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By Root 865 0

tell you about that morning five years ago when he interrogated me for hours about a financial misdemeanor. Thank heavens I hadn’t committed it, but only a literary argument, a purely literary argument, managed to convince him that I was telling the truth. Next time, maybe. In a future letter, if it comes up and especially if I’m allowed to (I’m not sure about that, to tell the truth). But what I want to tell you here is that he spoke to me the other night about a recent case, very recent, which he came across in his role of public prosecutor in Nanterre. A man had received a heavy sentence. The matter appeared to be classified as ultrasensitive. The formidable Courroye, on examining the file, finds that it’s not that clear, that this man was a simple soul, a Pierre Rivière* without the madness, and that he might have confessed to a crime he hadn’t committed. And the reactions of the colleagues Courroye asked to check, reinvestigate, possibly rejudge were inertia, apathy, the unwillingness of a machine that does not at any cost want to be challenged. Over a century later this is the same tune, the same story, the same distant but distinct echo of the mechanism of the Dreyfus affair, still this same “better an injustice than disorder.”

Courroye is certainly not a representative of the moralizing left you mention.

We certainly do not belong to the same part of the ideological and political spectrum.

But in this case, he was the one who was right.

When I left him, I said to myself—and I repeated it when I read your letter—that fortunately there are people within the institution who take the view that there can be no order worthy of the name if it is nourished by injustice.

In short, that line is detestable.

Even outside the courts, it’s a line that gets around, and everywhere it goes, it injects its poison.

It’s the line that springs to mind when you don’t want to bother with the destiny of a small people whose martyrdom doesn’t have even a butterfly effect on the workings of the planet.

It’s the phrase muttered to themselves by those bastards when you ask them to take sides with a handful of Tibetan monks—oh yes, those Tibetans! Not always such pure spirits as the Dalai Lama, ready for the mystical experience of having their body sliced through by a train—who are in the middle of screwing up their little diplomatic games.

It’s the typical line of someone who knows, on the one hand, that there’s injustice in Tibet and, on the other, that there will be a great disorder if we annoy the Chinese and they decide to punish us by selling their dollar reserves and not flying to the aid of Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.

It’s the phrase that would have occurred to the neighbors across the way from Family X, arrested one morning in July 1942 by the national police, by order of the Gestapo. What does one Jewish family matter? Isn’t France already in enough trouble as it is? Aren’t the French police, led by the valiant Bousquet and Papon,* going through hell to save anyone they can and give blankets to children? And frankly, is it really the moment to cause an almighty scandal, such disorder, because of some local injustice?

It’s a line that kills, it’s the most odious line of all time.

I don’t wish to offend you. I’m just saying what I feel. It’s a line that makes my blood run cold, and it distresses me to think that you seem to have made it your own, without giving it a second thought and moreover assuming—I wonder why exactly—that our contemporaries are likely to take your side …

I’ll go further.

Or perhaps not so far—I don’t know.

You may think that I’m overreacting, that I’m making this too personal and that this weakens my argument. But too bad, after what you threw out at me, I must be allowed to cross the line.

This sentence in itself turns my blood cold.

But it also turns my blood cold on a more personal level.

And I’ll even say that if it turns my blood cold, if I find it physically unbearable to read it in general and particularly when written by you, that’s because it resonates in me with obscure fears,