The debate took place on a Wednesday, which wasn’t ideal: the day before, I’d bought an assortment of microwave Indian dinners and three bottles of red wine. A high-pressure system had settled over Hungary and Poland, which prevented the low-pressure system over England from moving south; across continental Europe, the weather was unseasonably cold and dry. My doctoral students had been annoying the hell out of me with their lazy questions, mainly about why minor poets (Moréas, Corbière, etc.) were considered minor, and who said they couldn’t be considered major (like Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarmé, then Breton). Their questions were not disinterested, far from it. They were bad students with bad attitudes – one wanted to do his dissertation on Cros, the other on Corbière – but today I could see their hearts weren’t really in it, they just wanted to hear me give the establishment line. I punted, and recommended Laforgue as a compromise.

[...] I thought about Annelise’s life – and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether ‘stylish’ or ‘sexy’, most likely ‘stylish’ in her case. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day emailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner – he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and yoga pants, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known – had to have known – that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.

In the old days, people lived as families, that is to say, they reproduced, slogged through a few more years, long enough to see their children reach adulthood, then went to meet their Maker. The reasonable thing nowadays was for people to wait until they were closer to fifty or sixty and then move in together, when the one thing their ageing, aching bodies craved was a familiar touch, reassuring and chaste, and when the delights of regional cuisine, as celebrated every Sunday on Les Escapades de Petitrenaud, took precedence over all other pleasures. [...]

There was nothing to eat at home, and I didn’t want to deal with the Géant Casino – after work was the wrong time to go shopping in such a densely populated neighbourhood – but I was hungry. More than that, I felt like buying stuff to eat, blanquette de veau, pollock with chervil, Berber-style moussaka. Microwave dinners were reliably bland, but their colourful, happy packaging represented real progress compared with the heavy tribulations of Huysmans’ heroes. There was no malice in them, and one’s sense of participating in a collective experience, disappointing but egalitarian, smoothed the way to a partial acceptance.

I woke around four in the morning, lucid and alert. I took my time packing, assembling a small pharmacy and enough changes of clothing to last me a month. I even found the walking shoes – American, high-tech, never worn – that I’d bought a year before, when I thought I might take up hiking. I also packed my laptop, a stash of protein bars, an electric kettle and instant coffee. By five thirty I was ready to go. I had no trouble starting the car or getting onto the Périphérique. By six o’clock I was almost in Rambouillet. I had no plan, no exact destination, just a very vague sense that I ought to head south-west – that if a civil war should break out in France, it would take a while to reach the south-west. I knew next to nothing about the south-west, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war. Though of course, I could be wrong.

[...] She was a regular participant in gang bangs, usually held in swingers’ clubs, sometimes in car parks or other public places. Although she charged a nominal fee – fifty euros per person – she made a lot at these parties, since she invited as many as forty or fifty men, who took turns in all three orifices before they came on her. She promised to let me know next time she organised a gang bang. I thanked her. The truth was, I wasn’t interested, but she seemed like a nice person.

All of which is to say, these two escorts were fine. Still, that wasn’t enough to make me want to see them or have sex with them again, or to make me go on living. Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature.

[..] On the other hand, it did allow me to sign up for more escorts. I felt no real desire, only an obscure Kantian notion of ‘duty towards the self’, as I surfed my usual sites. In the end I settled on an ad posted by two girls: a twenty-two-year-old Moroccan named Rachida and a twenty-four-year-old Spaniard named Luisa promised ‘the enchantments of a wild and mischievous duo’. They were expensive, obviously, but I thought I was entitled to a little extravagance, all things considered. We made a date for that same evening.

During the night, a low-pressure system, originating over the Atlantic, had moved in from the south-west. The temperature had risen by six degrees; the countryside around Poitiers was wrapped in fog. I had called ahead for a taxi, and now I found myself with almost an hour to kill. I spent it at the Bar de l’Amitié, whose front door was fifty metres from the monastery, mindlessly downing Leffes and Hoegaardens. The waitress was thin and wore too much make-up. The other customers were talking in loud voices, mainly about real estate and vacations. It gave me no satisfaction to be back among people like myself.

He stopped there. I got the distinct feeling that he’d used up his first round of arguments. He tasted the Meursault, I poured myself a second glass. It occurred to me that I had never felt so desirable. Glory had been a long time coming. Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remembered almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of aura, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get into bed at four in the afternoon with a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of whisky; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up – I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.

‘Only on the surface, it seems to me. The only true atheists I’ve ever met were people in revolt. It wasn’t enough for them to coldly deny the existence of God – they had to refuse it, like Bakunin: “Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” They were atheists like Kirilov in The Possessed. They rejected God because they wanted to put man in his place. They were humanists, with lofty ideas about human liberty, human dignity. I don’t suppose you recognise yourself in this description.’

No, in fact, I didn’t; even the word humanism made me want to vomit, but that might have been the canapés. I’d overdone it on the canapés. I took another glass of the Meursault to settle my stomach.