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†Curzio Malaparte: Italian journalist and author, initially a Fascist, then an anti-Fascist.

*Bernard Pivot: French journalist and host of a cultural television program. Josyane Savigneau: French journalist and writer.

*Film by Lévy (1994).

May 20, 2008

Dear Bernard-Henri, your letter this time led me to a long period of unproductive thought, as usually happens when I try to think about issues of strategy (I would love to have been fascinated by Sun Tzu and the game of Go; or at least by chess and Clausewitz; sadly, when it comes to games, I never got much further than belote, Mille Bornes, and Tarot* at a push; I don’t know where I get it from; it’s strange given that I liked math, I was even good at it).

To tell the truth, I suspected that you were probably pretty experienced on the subject of slander; but I only suspected as much, and that bears out your success, but also its limitations. What I knew was that various unpleasant rumors had circulated about you; but I would have been incapable of recounting a single incident (although I have been known to read the newspapers in recent years).

So, you’re right, they are crap; they can’t even make up a memorable story, something even a third-rate novelist can manage. But it still leaves a trace, a taint; and it works, you know it does, and you have been a natural target for considerably longer than I have. Someone has a little bile, a little sad passion they need to vent? Well, there are people you can dump on; Bernard-Henri, for example. And Houellebecq, yeah, not bad, a lot of people are dumping on him these days.

When we started this correspondence, it occurred to me that I was likely to make new enemies—yours. Then, emboldened by your example, thinking to myself that it probably would be useful to “know my adversary’s position,” I went back to Googling myself. And gradually, but increasingly plainly, I realized a fact, a small but significant fact: we already have the same enemies. This is much more obvious on the Internet, where people rail against everything without any sense of decency, where everything is exaggerated, insulting, crude. But aside from the additional vulgarity (and after all, it’s probably normal that, in creating a “global village,” the Internet has brought back some of the cheerful brutality of village morals), it has to be admitted that the Internet adds little in comparison to the traditional printed media—in fact, it’s depressing the mediocre use humanity makes of this extraordinary tool.

Among our most constant and most bitter enemies are first and foremost all those Web sites (bakchich.info, for example) that adopt the same editorial approach as Le Canard enchaîné* or of Voici (I am unable to find any significant difference between those two magazines; the only thing that might be said is that when Frédéric Beigbeder was literary editor at Voici, it was a lot better than Le Canard). I regularly read pieces about myself in sections like “Indiscrétions,” or the “Téléphone Rouge,” the sort of gossip columns that have sprung up in most of the papers in recent years; these pieces are generally untrue, sometimes grotesquely so. But the prize for barefaced lying in any medium goes to Le Canard enchaîné. Not once have I read an accurate story about myself in Le Canard. And more often than not, it wasn’t even a case of exaggeration or a biased reading of the facts, but out-and-out fabrication. It’s staggering, when you consider that the people who read Le Canard enchaîné think they are reading secrets that most people don’t know, unearthed through hours of patient investigative work. It’s much simpler than that: they just make it up, they write the first thing that comes into their head, pure and simple. It’s also staggering the impunity these people enjoy, and go on enjoying: justice has the reputation for being complicated and slow, and very few victims (apart from politicians and those who have legal teams to deal with such things) take the effort