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*Le Lys et la cendre: Journal d’un écrivain au temps de la guerre de Bosnie, (Lillies and Ashes, a writer’s diary during the war in Bosnia; untranslated), published by Grasset, 1996.

June 30, 2008

I’m also feeling funny about our correspondence nearing its end.

How long has it been? Five months … six months … It’s been almost six months that we’ve been writing to each other like this, from a distance, without speaking—just our first phone call the day before yesterday, when I mentioned that I had gone to the country and you asked if the country was Esbly …*

Good God, Esbly!

I hadn’t heard or said the name in twenty years.

Nobody in the world, almost none of my friends, knows or remembers that my parents used to have a house there, sold when that pretty village on the banks of the Marne was poisoned by Disneyland.

And it took you, my secret correspondent, who knows about it from God knows where (I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask you), to throw out this name all of a sudden, to draw it back from the semi-oblivion to which I had consigned it and at the same time to inform me that a little later you spent your adolescence at Crécy, the neighboring village, a mere ten miles away. I used to cycle there or go there by boat on the Ourcq Canal. I recall the smell of the first picnics and of forbidden cigarettes, of blackberries and hawthorn. Guermantes was just down the road … a sort of Vivonne … my Combray … maybe yours.* How strange.

By the way, I mentioned on the phone that I had one of my first flirtations with the daughter of the notary in Esbly. I got that wrong. The notary’s daughter was at your place, Crécy. In Esbly there was the butcher’s wife. There were two butchers. One of them was called “the dead one” because the real butcher had been found dead in his cold room and his assistant, who was also his wife’s lover, had immediately taken over. The other was known as the “cuckold” because his wife, who was also his sales assistant, liked young boys and consumed them in great quantities. She sat enthroned on a high stool, with her Louis XIV hairstyle, attractive chin, and enormous bust just at the level of your eyes, a sort of trunk of a woman, the rest of whose body disappeared into the half-shadow of what you guessed was a small apartment. There was only a gap at the bottom of the pane of glass that divided her from the customers through which she handed people their change. If she liked a boy, she would give him back one franc more than he was owed and that was the signal to meet her at 7 p.m. exactly, under the Marne bridge at the entry to Isles-lès-Villenoy. She would bring her few things—a blanket, a folding chair for putting the clothes on, an empty bottle of aftershave that she had filled with brandy, and in winter a thermos flask with coffee.

In short, we’ve been corresponding for six months.

And it’s true that in the course of these six months something has happened.

As a rule I don’t really believe in dialogue.

As a philosopher I should—see Plato, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, and so many others.

But the truth is, I don’t believe in it, and in real life I’ve never understood the theory according to which it is enough to oppose each other, confront arguments and counterarguments, for the shadows of ignorance to lift as if by magic. In most discussions people arrive with their convictions and leave with the same ones. The idea of dialectics that would allow them to refine their point of view, to enrich or change it, has always struck me as highly unlikely. (Almost as unlikely as that other, Hegelian, idea, or to be more precise so-called Hegelian, which tells us that the dialectics between thesis and antithesis will always ultimately give rise to a synthesis—fortunately, the great Hegel never thought or wrote anything so silly!)

Let me say it again: undeniably something has happened here.

A real effort at dialogue has occurred through which, against expectation, we have moved forward a little.

We didn’t convince each other, although, in what you’ve just said about your relationship