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at it and devour it; the creatures still suffer a little, then are still. The others, a few feet away, continue their struggles and little games. From time to time they come closer to watch the agony of their companions; in these moments their eyes express only an empty curiosity.
     
     
    I quit the surveillance program; the image disappears, returns to the toolbar. There is a new message from Marie22:
     
     
The enumerated lump
    Of the eye that closes
    In the squashed space
    Contains the last term.
     
     
    247, 214327, 4166, 8275. Light appears, grows, and rises; I rush into a tunnel of light. I understand what man felt, when he penetrated woman. I understand woman.

 
     
    Daniel1, 4
     
Since we are men, it is right, not to laugh at the misfortunes of mankind, but to lament them.
    —Democritus of Abdera
     
    ISABELLE WAS GROWING WEAKER. Of course, it wasn’t easy, for a woman already wounded in the flesh, to work for a magazine like
Lolita,
where every month there arrived new tarts who were always younger, sexier, and more arrogant. I remember I was the first to touch on the question. We were walking along the top of the cliffs of Carbonera, which plunged, pitch black, into sparkling blue water. She didn’t seek any escape route, she didn’t evade the issue: indeed, indeed, in her line of work you had to maintain a certain atmosphere of conflict, of narcissistic competition, but of which she felt more incapable with every passing day. “Life debases,” Henri de Régnier once noted; life wears you out, above all—there doubtless remains in some people an unde-based core, a kernel of being; but what weight does this residue carry, in the face of the general decay of the body?
    “I’ll have to negotiate my severance package,” she said. “I don’t see how I’m going to be able to do that. The magazine is doing better and better, as well; I don’t know what pretext to invoke for my departure.”
    “Go and see Lajoinie, and explain to him. Simply tell him what you told me. He’s old already, I think he can understand. Of course, he’s a man of money, and power, and those are passions that die slowly; but, after all you’ve told me, I think he’s a man who can be sensitive to burnout.”
    She did what I proposed, and her conditions were accepted in their entirety; of course, the magazine owed her almost everything. For my part, I couldn’t yet call a halt to my career—not completely. Bizarrely entitled
Forward Snowy! Onwards to Aden!,
my last show was subtitled “100% Hateful”—the inscription was emblazoned across the poster, in Eminem-style handwriting; it was in no way hyperbole. From the outset, I got onto the subject of the conflict in the Middle East—which had already brought me a few significant media successes—in a manner which, wrote the
Le Monde
journalist, was “singularly abrasive.” The first sketch, entitled “The Battle of the Tiny Ones,” portrayed Arabs—renamed “Allah’s vermin”—Jews—described as “circumcised fleas”—and even some Lebanese Christians, afflicted with the pleasing sobriquet of “Crabs from the Cunt of Mary.” In short, as the critic for
Le Point
noted, the religions of the Book were “played off against each other”—in this sketch at least; the rest of the show included a screamingly funny playlet entitled “The Palestinians Are Ridiculous,” into which I slipped a variety of burlesque and salacious allusions about sticks of dynamite that female militants of Hezbollah put around their waists in order to make mashed Jew. I then widened this to an attack on all forms of rebellion, of nationalist or revolutionary struggle, and in reality against political action itself. Of course, I was developing throughout the show a vein of
right-wing anarchy,
along the lines of “one dead combatant means one less cunt able to fight,” which, from Céline to Audiard, had already contributed to the finest hours of French comedy; but beyond that,