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updating St. Paul’s premise that all authority comes from God, I sometimes elevated myself to a somber meditation, not unlike that of Christian apologetics. I did it, of course, by evacuating any theological notion and developing a structural and essentially mathematical argument, based notably on the concept of “well-ordering.” All in all, this show was a classic, and was heralded as such overnight: it was, without a shadow of a doubt, my biggest critical success. According to the general view, my comedy had never attained such heights; or it had never plumbed such depths—that was another way of looking at it, but in the end it meant much the same thing. I found myself being frequently compared to Chamfort, or even La Rochefoucauld.
    In the public arena, success was a little slower to arrive, until, that is, Bernard Kouchner declared himself “personally sickened” by the show, which enabled me to sell out the remaining weeks. On Isabelle’s advice, I wrote a little response to him in the “Right to Reply” section of
Libération,
which I entitled “Thanks, Bernard.” So things were going well, really well, which put me in a state that was all the more curious, because I was sick of it all, and, truth be told, only a hairsbreadth away from giving up; if things had turned bad, I believe I would have taken off without a word. My attraction to film as a medium—i.e., a dead medium, as opposed to what they pompously called at the time a
living spectacle
—had undoubtedly been the first sign in me of a disinterest in, even a disgust for, the general public—and probably for mankind in general. I was working at that time on my sketches with a small video camera, fixed on a tripod and linked to a monitor on which I could control in real time my intonations, funny expressions, and gestures. I had always had a simple principle: if I burst out laughing at a given moment, it was this moment that had a good chance of making the audience laugh as well. Little by little, as I watched the cassettes, I became aware that I was suffering from a deeper and deeper malaise, sometimes bordering on nausea. Two weeks before the premiere, the reason for this malaise became clear to me: what I found more and more unbearable wasn’t even my face, nor was it the repetitive and predictable nature of certain standard impersonations that I was obliged to do: what I could no longer stand was
laughter,
laughter in itself, that sudden and violent distortion of the features that deforms the human face and strips it instantly of all dignity. If man laughs, if he is the only one, in the animal kingdom, to exhibit this atrocious facial deformation, it is also the case that he is the only one, if you disregard the natural self-centeredness of animals, to have attained the supreme and infernal stage of
cruelty.
    The three-week run was a permanent calvary; for the first time, I truly experienced those notorious, atrocious
tears of the clown;
for the first time, I truly understood mankind. I had dismantled the cogs in the machine, and I knew how to make it work, whenever I wanted. Every evening, before going on stage, I swallowed an entire sheet of Xanax. Every time the audience laughed (and I could predict it, I knew how to dose my effects, I was a consummate professional), I was obliged to turn away so as not to see those
hideous
faces those, hundreds of faces moved by convulsions, agitated by hate.

 
     
    Daniel24, 4
     
    THIS PASSAGE from the narration by Daniel1 is undoubtedly, for us, one of the most difficult to understand. The videocassettes he alludes to have been retranscribed and annexed to his life story. I have had the opportunity to consult these documents. Being genetically descended from Daniel1, I have, of course, the same features, the same face: most of our gestures and expressions, even, are similar (although my own, living as I do in a nonsocial environment, are naturally more limited); but that sudden expressive distortion,