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did not stem solely from mere mechanical aptitude and, however uneducated he might be, he approached everything with a spirit of ingeniousness, something which, where small tasks are concerned, distinguishes the artists from the mere laborers and, in conversation, shows that knowledge is not everything. Having been resigned from an early age to the prospect of the life of a nun, I felt therefore that it was benign indeed of the heavens to have placed between my young bride’s hands a companion with such agreeable manners and who, while not an intellectual, was no less clever for it.
     
    I might have ended up with the likes of Grelier.
    Bernard Grelier is one of the rare souls at 7, rue de Grenelle in whose presence I have no fear of betraying myself. Whether I say to him: “ War and Peace is the staging of a determinist vision of history” or “You’d do well to oil the hinges in the garbage room,” he will not find that one is any more significant than the other. It even seems miraculous that the latter phrase manages to fire him into action. How can one do something one does not understand? No doubt this type of proposition does not require any rational processing and, like those stimuli that move in a loop through our bone marrow and set off a reflex without calling on the brain, perhaps the summons to apply oil is merely of a mechanical nature and sets in motion a reaction in one’s limbs without inviting the mind to participate.
    Bernard Grelier is the husband of Violette Grelier, who is the “housekeeper” for the Arthens. She began working for them thirty years ago as a simple maid, and she rose through the ranks as they in turn became wealthier, and once she was a housekeeper she found herself reigning over a laughable kingdom whose subjects were the cleaning lady (Manuela), the part-time butler (an Englishman), and the factotum (her husband); she is as scornful of the lower classes as are her high and mighty upper-class employers. All day long she jabbers like a magpie, busily rushing here and there, acting important, reprimanding her menial subalterns as if this were Versailles in better days, and exhausting Manuela with pontificating speeches about the love of a job well done and the decline of good manners.
    “She hasn’t read Marx,” said Manuela to me one day.
    The pertinence of this remark uttered by a Portuguese woman who is in no way well versed in the study of philosophy is striking. No, Violette Grelier has certainly not read any Marx, for the simple reason that he does not appear on any lists of cleaning products for rich people’s silverware. She has paid the price for this oversight by inheriting a daily routine punctuated with endless catalogues vaunting the qualities of starch and linen dust cloths.
    I, therefore, had been well married.
    To my husband, moreover, I had very quickly confessed my great sin.

Profound Thought No. 2
    The cat here on earth
Modern totem
And intermittently decorative
    I n any case, this is true at our place. If you want to understand my family, all you have to do is look at the cats. Our two cats are fat windbags who eat designer kibble and have no interesting interaction with human beings. They drag themselves from one sofa to the next and leave their fur everywhere, and no one seems to have grasped that they have no affection for any of us. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them.
    My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raving fraud. All you need to do is watch her with the cats. She’s vaguely aware of their decorative potential, and yet she insists on talking to them as if they were people, which she would never do with a lamp or an Etruscan statue. It would seem that children believe for a fairly long