Thanks to the lovers of the Elysée Palace, I now grasped the mystery of that young serving maid who, surprised in the bath by her master, gave herself to him with all the terror and fever of a dream finally realized. Yes, before that there had been this bizarre trio I had come across in a novel by Maupassant that I had read in the spring. Throughout the book a Parisian dandy desired the inaccessible love of a female creature, an amalgam of decadent refinements. He sought to gain entry to the heart of this cerebral, indolent courtesan, who was like a fragile orchid, and who always left him to hope in vain. And alongside them – the serving maid, the young woman in her bath with her robust and healthy body. At first reading all I could see was this triangle, which seemed to me artificial and lifeless: for how could the two women even consider one another as rivals…?

From now on I beheld the Parisian trio with new eyes. They became concrete, flesh, palpable – they were alive! I now recognized the blissful dread that caused the young servant maid to shiver when snatched from the bath and carried, all wet, to a bed. I sensed the tickling of the drops meandering over her full breasts, the weight of her haunches in the arms of the man; I even saw the rhythmic stirring of the water in the bath from which her body had just been lifted. Gradually the water grew calm… And the other, the inaccessible mondaine, who had previously reminded me of a dried flower between the pages of a book, now revealed an opaque, subterranean sensuality. Her body contained a perfumed warmth, a disturbing fragrance, made up of the throbbing of her blood, the polish of her skin, the alluring languor of her speech.

The fatal love that had caused the heart of the president to burst reshaped the France that I carried inside me. This came mainly from storybooks. But on that memorable evening the literary characters who rubbed shoulders on its highways seemed to be awakening after a long sleep.