Memory of very early childhood

I am in the courtyard behind the building where we live, on this street just outside the city, overlooking seemingly endless fields and forests. I see men walking towards the field and the orchards behind the building. Perhaps they are in disguise. Or dressed in a strange way, unusual for the child that I am. I feel that a kind of game is being prepared, a very serious game; something warlike is coming out of all this; that's the feeling that comes over me anyway. I want to join them.

Post tenebras lux

As a teenager, I once broke into a house. It was at the bottom of my street and bordered a square, or more precisely a plot of land half concreted, the other half with a few trees and tall grass. This square was bounded by an old wall on three sides and surrounded by houses and private gardens. One of these houses was particularly old, half-timbered, and had been called "the executioner's house" since time immemorial. Legend has it that it was the house of Joan of Arc's executioner.

It seemed vaguely abandoned; it wasn't in ruins at all, but there was something silent, still, asleep, like a holiday home, perhaps.

I entered it one summer afternoon with a schoolmate, Julia, with whom I had kept some distant relations. We knew (I can't tell you now how) that a door at the back, leading to the kitchen, was never locked.

My heart was pounding with the feeling that I was committing a transgression greater than a simple break-in. A moral, even metaphysical transgression, which I was unable to articulate precisely at my young age. Perhaps I was simply drawn to committing a forbidden act, drawn to the very idea of crime, of breaking and entering, of voyeurism. Not with the aim of harming anyone, but with the idea, again unstated, that at the end of the transgression awaited me revelations, a richness and depth of existence that a well-regulated, honest, law-abiding daily life did not allow.

The house was not abandoned at all. It was richly furnished and full of fascinating objects, clean and welcoming, warm and woody. I was not at all surprised; on the contrary, it was like finding myself in front of an obvious setting, a spectacle, that I knew obscurely I had to meet one day. A necessary step in my life, an archetypal house that I had to explore soon or later. I wandered with Julia through the rooms, taking my time, stopping on each knick-knack or old piece of furniture, fascinated.

I remember a long wooden table, a fireplace, a kitchen with ochre tiles and copper pans, well framed paintings on the walls, a thick dark leather sofa; I remember exposed beams, thick stone walls, fabric cushions, succulents and old books, I remember the fruit baskets, the first floor with its cosy bedrooms (there were three, obviously a family lived there, the parents and from the decoration, two teenagers, boy and girl).

An Amstrad CPC 6128, old cupboards, a wooden staircase, immemorial. The centuries seemed to cohabit here in peace.

It wasn't dark, strictly speaking, in the house, but the daylight came in soft, golden, lazy rays; it seemed slowed down, muted, respectful of the privacy, the tranquillity, the peace of the occupants, whose lives I wondered what they might look like and what kind of life they might lead in this place. Their existence, at the same time, seemed to me a little incongruous, almost theoretical and implausible; the house seemed made to remain silent, motionless, like a pure décor, a pure idea of a domestic paradise that should not be defiled by its presence. Perhaps the inhabitants avoided going home after having felt the same way I did?

On the way out we came face to face with a woman on a bicycle; the owner of the place. Julia ran away. But the woman was smiling, she seemed amused that she had caught us in the act and that she owned a house capable of producing such an attraction. I told her without any reluctance or shyness about my exploration of her intimate domain. It was like telling her how I would have made love to her – I was unable to consciously make that comparison at my young age, but the situation disturbed me in the same way. The landlady, who must have been in her forties, seemed to understand this, with intelligence and indulgence.

I don't know how long we had been in the house, but as I spoke to this smiling, almost entirely silent woman, who encouraged me to continue my confession with her simple smile, still riding her bicycle with one foot on the ground, I realised that dusk was falling; a warm, intense twilight, which gilded everything in a golden light, an idyllic light which further accentuated the attraction I felt for this older woman with whom I had just established a more intimate bond than I could have hoped for; a heavenly or Luciferian light, I don't know, but which secretly meant, for me alone, that my quest was a success.

14th of July

I remember one July 14th, a long time ago; I was between 20 and 23 years old, since it was when I was in university. I was spending my summer vacations driving around the region, alone, running away or on the contrary looking for something I would have been able to name. But on that July 14th, I wasn't driving at random; I had an appointment with my parents, who had invited me to a meal with them at the home of people I didn't know at all and who lived in a lost village in the Meuse; the kind of village you have no chance to hear about if you have nothing to do there. It was, as is often the case in Lorraine villages, a single street, lined with old, low, adjoining farmhouses. An impression of dilapidation and poverty emanated from it. There was absolutely no car traffic – it was half past noon – and not a single passer-by could be seen in the street. Towards the end of the commune, for a few hundred meters, the old houses gave way to more recent pavilions, more spaced out, separated by lawns and hedges or fences. There too, no sign of life. No noise, no movement. The whole village, I had noted in passing, was given over to the harsh rays of the sun, since no trees were planted along the road. There was no forest in the distance either, nor any pleasant or picturesque scenery; only the plain, quite flat, and endless. All this gave a depressing impression of nakedness. I had forgotten the address where I was supposed to go, and after parking at random, I had spent a good twenty minutes walking through the village from beginning to end, two or three times – until my mother, probably seeing me through a window, came out of a house. That house was nicely decorated, warm, and had a family that was obviously quite well-to-do, but not a "nouveau riche" family. Many other inhabitants of the village were there; obviously, here, the notion of community was still a reality, it was not at all a dormitory village. I had been quickly slipped a glass of champagne in my hand (but who really celebrates the 14th of July, by the way? who were these people for whom all this still makes sense?) and I had finally spent a pleasant day, telling myself that if nature likes to hide, so does social life, community life; the countryside is perhaps not as dead and anonymous as one thinks when one crosses it as a stranger. They simply protect themselves from us.