Simple, answered Étienne, slightly surprised. The law is there. Respect it.
His visitors sighed. It’s complicated …
What’s complicated? The law says that the contract must be drawn up in eight-point type and it almost never is, so I’m taking advantage of that to shoot down your interest charges. You can say I’m nitpicking. But instead tell me why, since you know the rule and it’s easy to apply, you still don’t apply it. I have my own idea about the answer: it suits you that the contracts are hard to read. Here’s something else. Why don’t you ever send out letters offering to renew your contracts? Is it because you consider them renewed by tacit agreement, which—let me just point out—is also against the law? I can tell you why, because one of your own people told me. (In fact, this was Florès, whose friends in the loan industry kept him abreast of insider gossip.) Because when you did send out those letters, you had a 30 percent cancellation rate. And that’s really annoying. Experience tells us that a dormant credit card will get used sooner or later, whereas a canceled card is a dead loss. And why do you never mention the interest rates except in tiny letters squirreled away on the back of a flashy brochure? You know why. Because they’re horrendous, your interest rates—18 percent, 19 percent, more than the usury rate—and you slip that mickey to people who would never sign up if they realized what you were doing.
That’s where you’re wrong, replied the man from Paris. They sign anyway because they have no choice. Sure you can say they’d be better off taking out a standard loan, but those standard loans—the problem is our clients can’t get them. It’s like insuring your car when you’ve got so many points on your license that no one will take you: of course it’s expensive. You keep talking about information. You tell us we don’t give our clients enough information about what they’re getting into, then you accuse us of not gathering enough information about our clients’ ability to repay us. But our clients, what they want is money, not information that dissuades them from borrowing it. And what we want is to earn money by loaning it, not to collect information that persuades us not to lend it. We’re only doing our job. Credit exists, and you, what you’re doing with your constant quibbling about the way our contracts look, is really complaining about advertising, which is always like that. In big letters it says: Buy your car for 30 euros a month, but there’s an asterisk, and down below—in small print you’ve got to look at carefully, true—there are clauses saying that it costs a little more than 30 euros a month or else that the offer’s valid at certain times but not others. Everyone knows this, people aren’t fools. But you, if I’ve got this straight, you want a world without advertising, without credit, maybe without TV, too, because we all know TV rots people’s brains …
Of course, Étienne said with a smile, and by the way, I spend my vacations in North Korea. No, I’m fine with a world where people have the right to break the law. But I also want, as a judge, the right to make people respect it. Isn’t that what liberalism is?
16
One thing makes Étienne laugh when he talks about meeting Juliette: what went through his mind the first time he saw her. Someone knocked on his door; he said, Come in, and when he looked up, she was coming toward him on crutches. Wow! he thought. A gimp!
It’s not having had the thought that makes him laugh but that it just popped up ready-made in those three exact words, he swears—including the “Wow!” A moment later, above the crutches he saw a pleasing face, a lovely smile, something open, joyous, and grave, but what came first were the crutches. Her way of coming toward him on those crutches—he took that right away as a gift. And he immediately felt happy to be able to give her a present in return, and so simply: he merely stood up and came out from behind his desk to show her that even though he didn’t have crutches, he limped, too.
17
When I decided to go to Vienne in early autumn to hang around the courthouse and see what a juge d’instance does, I realized that it was time to phone Patrice. Since only Hélène and Étienne knew anything about my project, I was apprehensive about that call. In the event, he seemed a little surprised to hear from me, but not at all suspicious. Just come to the house, he said.
He was waiting for me on the station platform, holding Diane in his arms, and asked if I’d mind coming along while he did some shopping. The girls usually came home for lunch, so he had to fix them three meals a day, three meals for three little girls, the youngest only one and a half, but he never lost his patience, raising his voice only slightly whenever they were being too naughty. Back at the house, I jumped right in to help, fetching the groceries from the trunk, setting and clearing the table, loading and emptying the dishwasher, wiping off the yellow Formica table, cleaning up the rice and yogurt launched by Diane from her high chair, and in an hour I felt like part of the household. Patrice welcomed my presence calmly, and neither he nor the girls seemed to wonder why I was there. After lunch, he put Diane down for her nap, Amélie and Clara walked across the square to school, and we men went to sit under the catalpa in the garden with our coffees. We talked of this and that, about how their life was organized now that Juliette was gone. Patrice seemed neither curious nor anxious about why I was visiting him. I’d come to spend a few days with them, we were chatting over coffee—it was as simple as that. On the train to Vienne I’d wondered what tack I might take to get things started, but now I wasn’t worried at all. Finishing my coffee, I pulled out my notebook, as I had in Étienne’s kitchen, and said, Now I’d like you to talk to me about Juliette. And to begin with, about yourself.
His father, a tall, dry, austere fellow with a full set of chin whiskers, is a math teacher, and his mother an elementary school teacher who left her job to raise their children. The couple’s love of mountains took them first to the town of Albertville, in the Savoie, and later to a village near Bourg-Saint-Maurice, where they bought a house. A militant ecologist right from the start, his father is the sworn enemy of huge ski resorts, advertising, television (which he refuses to have), and consumer society in general. His three sons, who admired him, also feared him a little. Their mother spoiled them, wanted them to be confident and outgoing little boys, and Patrice feels—without any resentment—that she protected them a bit too much, at least in his case. For example, since he was afraid of being bullied, she decided he wasn’t ready for secondary school and had him repeat his last year of primary education. When he and his brothers were children, everything was fine, and they had a group of boys with whom they played cowboys and Indians in the village streets. But things changed with adolescence. Halfway through secondary school, their friends began dropping out, which was not an option for Patrice and his brothers. The other boys had mopeds, they smoked and chased girls; the brothers did not, and true to their parents’ values, they thought their pals were wasting their lives. Instead of going dancing on Saturday nights, they listened to records in their bedroom with the lights out: Pink Floyd and Graeme Allwright, a singer-songwriter who moved to France from New Zealand in his early twenties and translated songs by Leonard Cohen into French. The brothers didn’t feel superior, but they did feel different. Their friends, whom they still see today, are garage mechanics, masons, ski-rental guys, or ski-slope groomers at Bourg-Saint-Maurice. Patrice’s two brothers became elementary school teachers like their mother and still live in Savoie, while Patrice is a cartoonist in the neighboring département of Isère. None of them has wandered far from home or succeeded—or failed—spectacularly, yet the differences remain. After Diane’s nap, when we took her to the nanny who watches her for a few hours in the afternoon, Patrice mentioned that the woman and her husband don’t live the way his own little family does, meaning that they always have the TV on, are avid soccer fans, and lean to the right politically, maybe even the extreme right. Having said that, he added that they were wonderful people and I was sure he meant it, sure that his observations on their values reflected no disdain, none of the snobbism that can be all the more intense when the actual differences
are rather small. Patrice just goes on talking to his neighbors about the global justice movement or currency transaction taxes, without much success but without any doubt that he’s right and without any contempt for those who don’t share his views and who feel there are too many foreigners in France.
Patrice wasn’t very good in school and admits he was lazy. He liked to daydream off in his corner about imaginary lives in worlds peopled with knights, giants, and princesses. He gave form to these reveries by writing his own versions of those books in which “YOU Are the Hero.” When he flunked his baccalaureate exam, he refused to repeat his last year of school, because nothing he’d learned there interested him. The problem was that nothing else interested him either, no profession except, after he’d thought about it, drawing comic strips. Finally, he’d found an answer to the embarrassing question, What do you want to do when you grow up? It was a refuge rather than a true vocation, he admits, a way of keeping at bay a real world in which you must be strong and struggle to succeed. His parents agreed to send him to Paris, where he shared an attic room with a cousin and worked on the drawings that he hoped would be his entrée into publishing. With hindsight, he regrets not going to art school and thereby passing up the chance to acquire a solid technical foundation. He was a complete autodidact, drawing in ballpoint on sheets of graph paper, ignorant of almost everything that was happening in his chosen field. He was familiar with Tintin, the medieval adventurers Johan and Peewit, the little bellboy Spirou, the cowboy and Civil War veteran Blueberry—and he left it at that. Sometimes he’d leaf through comics for adults in a bookstore, but just looking at those aggressive, sophisticated images seemed to betray the childlike world he still cherished. Patrice used to wander around Paris with his cousin, another romantic, who was studying the viola. Occasionally they’d go to the Parc de Sceaux, just south of Paris, climb a tree, and stay there all day, dreaming about the princess they were each going to find. After a year, though, Patrice was ready to write “The End” on the last panel of his comic book and have a try at selling it. The fellow he saw at Casterman, the publisher of Franco-Belgian comics, told him gently that his work was not bad but too naïve, too sentimental. Patrice left with his portfolio under his arm, disappointed yet not really surprised. He didn’t knock on any other doors. The world of comics was tougher than the world of his comics.
When he was old enough for military service, he never considered either signing up for alternative service like any middle-class youth with common sense or getting himself rejected on medical grounds the way the bourgeois rebels did. He was staunchly anti-war, so naturally he became a conscientious objector, serving the army in a noncombat role. He wound up doing vaguely medieval-looking animation in a château near Clermont-Ferrand, which he might have enjoyed if his colleagues hadn’t turned out to be as vulgar and foulmouthed as any soldiers, and after that Patrice worked on career-choice brochures in a state publishing house, devoting his talent to illustrating little dialogues for teaching language skills. Released from the army after two years, he registered at the National Employment Agency, which found him a job as a delivery driver. He moved into a studio apartment in Cachan, in the southern suburbs of Paris. Objectively speaking, he had good reason to worry about his future, but he didn’t. Career plans were not his thing, and neither was worrying.
At a community arts center in the 5th arrondissement, Patrice signed up for an amateur theater class that focused on improvisation and body expression exercises, which suited him much more than acting in real plays. The students would put on some New Agey music and lie on foam rubber mats on the floor, their only instruction to let themselves go. They’d start out curled up, then begin to move, slowly unfolding like a flower turning toward the sun, reaching out to the other students, coming into contact with them. It was magic. Other exercises, for two people, would be to stand looking into each other’s eyes while trying to express an emotion: suspicion, trust, fear, desire … Patrice learned from this theatrical experience how ill at ease he was in his relations with other people. He was a handsome young man, as I could see in the photos he showed me, but he describes himself as having been a pimply scarecrow with a brand-new beard, granny glasses, an Afro, and scarves knitted by his mother. The theater brought him out of himself. It was a path to other people and, above all, to girls. He’d grown up in a brotherhood of boys, and not only had he never slept with a girl, but he literally did not know any. Thanks to that theater course, he met some. He invited a few to cafés and the movies, but his romanticism included a Puritan streak and girls who seemed too liberated scared him off. That’s when Juliette showed up.
Whenever Hélène told me that she’d been jealous of Juliette, who was the prettiest of the three sisters, I’d shake my head. I’d seen Juliette sick, I’d seen her dying, I’d seen childhood photos in which she and Hélène looked almost like twins. But in the ones Patrice showed me, Juliette was in fact extraordinarily lovely, with a large, sensual mouth and a toothy smile, like Julia Roberts, and that smile was not only radiant, which everyone says about her, but voracious, almost carnivorous. Sociable, funny, at ease with people, she had a charisma that ought to have discouraged a boy like Patrice. Luckily, there were those crutches. They made her accessible.
They didn’t go out alone at first, only as part of the group. The teacher took them to the theater, where there were stairs Juliette couldn’t climb. Patrice, shy but well built, carried Juliette upstairs in his arms, and from then on that was the rule. One carrying the other, they went up all the stairs they encountered. Soon the two of them began visiting monuments, preferably those with many floors, and when they sat next to each other in darkened theaters, they started holding hands. They were both very sensitive about hands, Patrice remembers. Their fingers would exchange caresses and twine together for hours, and it was never the same, always new, always deeply moving. He hardly dared believe this miracle was happening to him. Then they kissed. Then they made love. He undressed her, she was naked in his arms; gently he moved her almost motionless legs. For both of them, it was the first time.
Patrice had found the princess of his dreams. Smart, beautiful, too smart and beautiful for him, he thought, and yet with her everything was simple. He needn’t fear any calculated flirting, or deception, or treachery. He could be himself with her, without being afraid she might take advantage of his naïveté. They both took what was happening to them seriously. They were in love. And so they would be husband and wife.
Still, in the beginning the differences in their characters worried them, especially Juliette. Not only did Patrice have no real profession but he wasn’t concerned about it. Earning enough to live on by driving delivery vans or running a comics workshop in a Ville de Paris recreation center was fine with him. Juliette, however, was energetic and determined. She attached great importance to her studies, so it bothered her that Patrice was such a dreamer, so easygoing. And it bothered Patrice that she was studying law and, what’s more, at the Université Panthéon-Assas, the most elite law school in the country and a hotbed of fascists. Though he wasn’t politically active, Patrice called himself an anarchist and considered the law nothing but an instrument of repression in the service of the rich and powerful. Now, if Juliette had wanted to be a lawyer, to defend widows and orphans, he could have understood, but a judge! At one point, Juliette had actually thought about joining the bar and had earned a master’s in business law, but her courses had disgusted her. The professors taught their students sneaky ways to help future clients make huge profits and how to extract fat retainers in return. This open alliance with the law of the jungle, the smiling cynicism of her teachers and fellow students all proved the correctness of Patrice’s contemptuous diatribes. Patiently, Juliette explained that she loved the law because in the contest between the weak and the strong it’s the law that protects and freedom that enslaves, and if she wanted to become a judge it was to make others respect the law, not pervert it. Patrice understood in theory, but still, being married t
o a judge would be hard for him to swallow.
The difference between their backgrounds was another sticking point. Juliette lived with her parents, and every time he went to see her at their spacious apartment in Montparnasse he felt desperately uncomfortable. Both distinguished scientists, Jacques and Marie-Aude were Catholics, elitists, right-leaning, and in their home Patrice felt looked down on—the provincial boy whose schoolteacher parents drove around in battered heaps plastered with anti–nuclear power stickers. His folks had a rule: You can discuss anything, in fact you must discuss everything, for from discussion comes enlightenment. As far as Juliette’s parents were concerned (and mine, moreover), a Savoyard ecologist who believed microwave ovens were dangerous was as impossible to reason with as someone who claimed the sun revolved around the earth, and a flat earth at that. As they saw it, opinions were not equally worthy of consideration, there were simply people who knew and people who didn’t, and there was no point in acting as if a meaningful discussion were possible. Granted, Patrice was nice enough, he sincerely loved Juliette, but he represented everything they loathed: long hair, that 1968 antiauthoritarian foolishness, and, worst of all, failure. They saw him as a loser and could not accept the fact that their gifted daughter was in love with one. Patrice’s hostility had more general, abstract targets: big capital, religion as the opium of the people, an overweening faith in science, but it wasn’t in his character to apply aversions in principle to actual people. The contempt he sensed on the part of his future in-laws disarmed him: he could not feel contempt for them in return but simply thought he’d have been better off if he’d never met them. But he had, and he loved Juliette, so they’d just have to work things out.
Other Lives But Mine Page 14