The train leaves from Montparnasse in an hour. I've actually bought tickets, for once. It's May, the weather isn't great. I went swimming early, when the pool opened, to help me stay calm if anything goes wrong. I've been very careful not to get too excited. It was Paul who asked to go to Montlouis for a weekend. It's been almost a year and a half since we last spent a whole day together, since we last saw each other without an audience. Two years since he last saw my dad. They get on well. Paul always says, Isn't it funny how much I look like Grandpa? The association transmitted Paul's request, expressed in their presence during his hour with me, then reiterated in my absence, and Laurent finally said OK, seeing as he'd refused three times under various pretexts and was beginning, I think, to look like a moron. But then, one hour before we're supposed to leave, he calls me. He says Paul doesn't want to go anymore. He says he tried to insist but there's nothing he can do. He suggests we meet in a cafe, I accept. I tell myself it's a good sign, this cafe thing. Maybe he'll end up giving in. Not today, of course, but soon. This crusade of his must be exhausting. We haven't seen each other since the hearing. We haven't spoken normally to each other for a thousand years. We spent twenty years together, that's the first thing I see when he arrives, the past. He does too, I think. I can see he still loves me even though he hates me. We both say hi. He still wears the same clothes, loafers that cost a thousand euros, jeans a little on the tight side, those blue tailored shirts he has twenty of, the only thing he wears, and an old jacket, also tailored. Pretty chic in an uptight kind of way. He's losing his hair, he's gray in the face, tight-lipped. I guess he must be thinking about how I've aged, too, even though since I left him I've never felt younger. He says I smell good, asks me what perfume I'm wearing, how I am, whether I'm still swimming. Then without missing a beat he says I'm making no effort to resolve the situation. He says he has his sources. Then he says that Paul is doing really well, that he's getting excellent grades at school, that everything's been going well in his life since I left. The bells of Saint-Sulpice ring, then he says, All of us will wind up there in the end, anyway. That day, after I left him, as I was walking to the station to take the train alone, I thought about how everyone crosses paths with the devil at least once in life, because you have to experience evil, just like you have to experience love, desire, sadness. But the devil isn't a red monster with a fork in his hand, he's familiar, the most familiar thing of all, the devil doesn't have to be that frightening, he's as tall as me but not always as strong, a lost soul, a wretch. It's Paul I'm crying for.