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onto an enormous screen, are visible from afar by all, are admired by all, and are to all beyond reach. Through a worshipful fixation on famous people, a person who sees himself as elect serves public notice of both his membership in the extraordinary and his distance from the ordinary, which is to say, in concrete terms, from the neighbors, the colleagues, the partners, with whom he (or she) is obliged to live.
    Thus famous people have become a public resource like sewer systems, like Social Security, like insurance, like insane asylums. But they are useful only on condition of remaining truly beyond reach. When someone seeks to confirm his elect status by a direct, personal contact with someone famous, he runs the risk of being thrown out, like the woman who loved Kissinger. In theological language, that is called the Fall. That is why in her book the woman who loved Kissinger describes her love explicitly, and correctly, as “tragic,” because a fall, despite Goujard’s jeers, is tragic by definition.
    Until the moment she realized she was in love with Berck, Immaculata had lived the life most women live: a few marriages, a few divorces, a
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    few lovers who brought her a disappointment as regular as it was tranquil and almost agreeable. The latest of her lovers is particularly worshipful; she finds him somewhat more bearable than the others, not only because he is submissive but because he is useful: he is a cameraman who helped her a great deal when she started to work in television. He is a little older than she, but he has the quality of an eternal worshipful student; he finds her the most beautiful, the most intelligent, and (especially) the most sensitive of all women.
    His beloved’s sensitivity seems to him like a landscape by a German Romantic painter: scattered with trees in unimaginably contorted shapes, and above them a faraway blue sky, God’s dwelling place; each time he steps into this landscape, he feels an irresistible impulse to fall to his knees and to stay fixed there, as if witnessing a divine miracle.
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    The room fills gradually; there are many French entomologists and a few from abroad, among them a Czech in his sixties who people say is some prominent figure in the new regime, a minister perhaps or the president of the Academy of Sciences or at least a member of that academy. In any case, if only from the standpoint of simple curiosity, this is the most interesting figure in the assembly (he represents a new period in history, after Communism has gone off into the mists of time); yet amid this chattering crowd he is standing, tall and awkward, all alone. For a while, people were rushing up to grasp his hand and ask him various questions, but the discussion always ended much sooner than they expected, and after the first four sentences back and forth, they had no idea what to talk to him about next. Because when it came down to it, there was no mutual topic. The French reverted quickly to their own problems, he tried to follow them, from time to time he would remark, “In our country, on the other hand,” then, having seen that no one cared
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    what was happening “in our country, on the other hand,” he would move off, his face veiled in a melancholy that was neither bitter nor unhappy, but reasonable and almost condescending.
    As the others crowd noisily into the lobby with its bar, he enters the empty room where four long tables, arranged in a square, await the start of the conference. By the door is a small table with the list of the participants and a young woman who looks as left behind as he. He leans toward her and tells her his name. She has him pronounce it again, twice. Not daring to ask him a third time, she leafs vaguely through her list for a name that might resemble the sound she has heard.
    Full of fatherly goodwill, the Czech scientist leans over the list and finds his name: he puts his finger on it: CECHORIPSKY.
    “Ah, Monsieur Sechoripi?” says she.
    “It’s