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There were quite a lot of people at the meeting that afternoon (the press officer, the publishing director, a number of the writers for the magazine), and they all commented on the review, dissected it, discussed the possibility of a counterattack. I was astonished. At the time, I didn’t know who Angelo Rinaldi was (for younger readers, I should point out that he was an influential French literary critic in the 1980s and 1990s). I couldn’t think who would read L’Express (I still can’t). After a while, I sensed that I was starting to rile people, dumbly repeating in various forms, “But it doesn’t matter, it’s just an article in a maga-ziiiiiiiine …”

Michel Bulteau glanced at me irritably; he must have been thinking that I would understand in time.

In short, we decline, that’s what I mean to say; we start off placing the book on a pedestal, on a very high pedestal, and everything else (newspapers, magazines) doesn’t exist, has no importance whatever, they are simply a teeming mass of parasites who disturb the unique and perfect relationship between an author and each and every one of his readers.

And then eventually you come to realize the reality. What got me, my personal Achilles’ heel, was money. For me, everything was played out in the few days surrounding the publication of The Elementary Particles. In those few days I realized that I had a chance, a small chance, of escaping from the world of work. It was wonderful, it was unhoped for. So, yes, I moved heaven and earth to widen the crack through which the light was streaming. I did all the media, absolutely all of them. Because it has to be understood that while I had perfectly nice work colleagues (especially at the Assemblée Nationale), office work was a complete waste of time for me; from the first it was only ever a job that paid the rent.

And, at the time, I thought that book sales had some connection with the media coverage they got. Actually, everyone around me seemed to believe it too. For PR people, that’s normal, it’s their job. For a publisher, it’s a little more curious; you expect him to be a businessman, you assume he looks at the bottom line from time to time, that he should have worked it out by now. But publishers, like producers, are probably not really businessmen; they too are hoping for a certain cultural recognition, which, curiously, they associate with the media rather than, say, with university work.

Deep down, I was never really interested in celebrity. If, for example, I had had a small private income, I would certainly have written books (I might well have written more), but I would never have set foot in a television studio.

Be that as it may, after the sensational success of The Elementary Particles, I was caught up in the system; and I had also become the man to bring down. At first, in the hands of old codgers like Angelo Rinaldi and Michel Polac,* things were relatively calm, they remained within the bounds of the literary polemic; but I would quickly experience much worse. I would quickly realize that in interviews, just like on an American cop show, everything I said “could be taken down and used against me.” And even things I didn’t say. Demonpion, a specialist on the subject of me, quickly defined how my statements should be treated. Either I express a reprehensible opinion, in which case it’s very simple, I’m a bastard; or I don’t express the required reprehensible opinion, in which case I’m a bastard and a hypocrite.

An example taken from an interview with this creep:

“Do you think he’s an Islamophobe?”

“Yes, yes, absolutely, I can prove it, his own statements prove it.”

“Do you think he’s racist?”

“Here, you have to be careful, because he’s usually very cautious.”

(I can’t guarantee I’m quoting word for word, but I have scrupulously respected the spirit, it can easily be checked.)*

(It’s important to point out that this did not happen under some fascist dictatorship, or during the period of the Moscow trials, but in France three years ago.)

You are completely right, I shouldn’t lump these things together.