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Kissinger has been told by counterespionage to stop seeing her; the office where they meet is bristling with microphones and he knows it; his so astoundingly cruel remarks are meant not for her but for the invisible cops monitoring them. She gazes at him with an understanding and melancholy smile; the scene seems to her lit by tragic (the adjective she uses constantly) beauty: he is forced to deal her these blows, and meanwhile his gaze speaks to her of love.
    Goujard is laughing, but I tell him: the obvious truth of the actual situation visible through the woman’s fantasy is less important than he thinks; that’s just a paltry, literal truth, it pales in the face of another one, which is loftier and timeless:
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    the truth of the Book. Even in her first encounter with her idol, this book was sitting in majesty, invisible, on a little table between them, being from that moment forward the unacknowledged and unconscious objective of her whole adventure. Book? What for? To lay out a portrait of Kissinger? Not at all, she had absolutely nothing to say about him! What fascinated her was her own truth about herself. She did not want Kissinger, still less his body (“he must be a poor lover”); she wanted to amplify her self, bring it out of the narrow circle of her life, make it blaze, turn it into light. Kissinger was for her a mythological steed, a winged horse that her self would mount for her great flight across the sky.
    “She was a fool,” Goujard concludes curtly, scoffing at my fancy analyses.
    “No, no,” I say, “witnesses attest to her intelligence. It’s something different from stupidity. She was convinced she was among the elect.”
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    Being among the elect is a theological notion that means: not as a matter of merit but by a supernatural judgment, a free, even capricious, determination of God, a person is chosen for something exceptional and extraordinary. From such a conviction the saints drew the strength to withstand the most dreadful tortures. Like parodies of themselves, theological notions are reflected in the triviality of our lives; each of us suffers (more or less) from the baseness of his too commonplace life and yearns to escape it and rise to a higher level. All of us have known the illusion (more or less strong) that we are worthy of that higher level, that we are predestined and chosen for it.
    The feeling of being elect is present, for instance, in every love relation. For love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then I’m disappointed; such
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    love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.
    Perhaps it is as an infant that one first experiences the illusion of being elect, because of the maternal attentions one receives without meriting them and demands with all the more determination. Upbringing should get rid of that illusion and make clear that everything in life has a price. But it is often too late. You have surely seen some ten-year-old girl who is trying to impose her will on her little friends and who, suddenly finding herself short of arguments, shouts with astounding arrogance: “Because I say so”; or: “Because that’s how I want it.” She feels elect. But one day she is going to say “Because that’s how I want it,” and everyone around her will burst out laughing. When a person sees himself as elect, what can he do to prove his election, to make himself and others believe that he does not belong to the common herd?
    That is where the era founded on the invention of photography comes to the rescue, with its stars, its dancers, its celebrities, whose images,
    projected