Naturally not all those intermediate books give good results. Among the many ways of reading, I disapprove of the one that smooths, normalizes stories. Movie readings often run that risk. Film increasingly digs into literature absent-mindedly, in search only of a starting point, raw material. What in a text is anomalous or disquieting the film often considers a negative and eliminates or doesn’t even notice. It prefers to take from the book what is proved and what is assumed the audience will want to see and see again. It is therefore not the anarchic ransacking of a literary work that should worry the writer: a novel is written precisely so that its readers can appropriate it. Nor is there any need, on the part of directors with a strong authorial sense, to hide or deny by every means the literary origin of their own work: not to recognize their debts is a widespread vice and doesn’t in the least damage the work they are indebted to, at most it wounds the vanity of the writer. It is, rather, the cinematographic normalization of the literary text that is disturbing. To return to Gabrielle, although Isabelle Huppert gives the best of herself and Chéreau’s film engages us through the figure of the woman she depicts, we feel that the hospitality of Conrad’s words has been abused, that the woman on the screen is less disturbing than the anonymous wife of the page, that the shadowy house that the writer has built for us has been exchanged for a habitation that is easily habitable. This, and only this, should grieve those who love literature.