Before that – however much they had waved their swords, climbed rope ladders, swallowed arsenic, declared their love, traveled in carriages while holding the severed head of their beloved on their knees – they never escaped from their world of fiction. Exotic, brilliant, comic perhaps, they did not move me. Like that curé in Flaubert, the country priest to whom Emma Bovary confessed her torments, I had not been able to understand the woman either: "But what more can she desire, she who has a beautiful house, an industrious husband, and the respect of her neighbors…?"

The Elysée lovers helped me to understand Madame Bovary. In a flash of intuition I seized on this detail: the plump fingers of the hairdresser deftly tugging and smoothing Emma's hair. In the cramped salon the air is heavy, the light from the candles that banishes the evening darkness is hazy. This woman, seated before the mirror, has just left her young lover and is now preparing to return home. Yes, I guessed what an adulterous woman might feel in the evening, at the hairdresser's, between the last kiss of a rendezvous at the hotel and the first, very ordinary words that must be addressed to the husband… Without being able to explain it myself, I felt as if I heard a string vibrating in the soul of this woman. My own heart sang out in unison. A smiling voice that came from Charlotte 's stories prompted me: "Emma Bovary, c'est moi!"

* * *

Time passed in our Atlantis according to its own laws. To be precise, it did not pass but rippled around each event described by Charlotte. Each fact, even perfectly accidental ones, became encrusted forever in the daily life of that country. A comet was always crossing its night sky, even though our grandmother, consulting a press cutting, gave us the precise date of this sudden apparition in the heavens: October 17, 1882. We could not picture the Eiffel Tower without seeing the mad Austrian who had leaped from its jagged spire, whose parachute had failed him and who crashed in the midst of a gawking crowd.