What If I became riche one day?

The light of October dawn penetrated through the high cremona windows of the mansion in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, drawing rectangles of an almost clinical pallor on the old oak floor. In the vast library with its walls hung with raw silk, no sound of the city could pierce the thickness of the double leaves and the paved courtyard that isolated the building from the rest of the world. Victoire was seated at her desk, a stern piece of mahogany furniture inherited from a jurist of the last century, but long since rid of the slightest trace of procedure. There were no red codes with bindings worn out by the courtrooms, no replies or summary conclusions. That world, that of the courts where she had spent ten years of her youth in the handling of conventional rhetoric, now belonged to a bygone geological stratum of her existence. She had drawn a clear line, without regret or nostalgia, dismissing colleagues, solemn audiences and vain waving of crowns to enter into religion with literature. On the patinated leather desk pad rested a bilingual edition of the Argonautics by Apollonius of Rhodes, wide open to canto III, as well as several school notebooks with marbled covers. Victoire wrote by hand, with a gold fountain pen whose delivery tolerated no hesitation. Her mind did not seek the prettyness or the facilities of the time, but a prose cut with pruning hooks, mineral and demanding, nourished by the syntax of the Greek tragedies and the moral dryness of the Stoics. At his feet, on a crimson velvet cushion placed near the hearth where two beech logs were finishing their consumption, Poupoune slept in a ball. This little griffin dog, with silky hair and an awakened muzzle, constituted his only earthly intimacy. In a universe freed from family contingencies and the servitudes of marriage, the animal occupied the emotional space with sovereign discretion. Poupoune asked for nothing more than a presence and the regular rhythm of the days; she was the mute witness of her inky nights and her prolonged silences, replacing without fuss or sacrifice the tumults of a motherhood that Victoire had never desired. Victoire's literary rise had occurred like an earthquake of classical precision. After years of underground work, her first two novels, first published by a demanding publishing house in Stockholm and then simultaneously translated into German, Italian and English, had received a masterful reception. The European coronation had been dazzling: crowned by Scandinavian juries, praised to the skies by international critics for the rigour of her language and the luminous darkness of her vision, she had seen foreign awards pour in, accompanied by monumental print runs. The resulting fortune had increased tenfold without her noticing. To manage this sudden opulence, she had been content to appoint a wealth manager based in the Place Vendôme, an austere and efficient man whom she met for only half an hour each autumn. Victoire was not interested in the mechanisms of return or the subtleties of tax optimization; for her, gold had only one function, metaphysical and political: to buy peace, to guarantee its autarky and to erect an impregnable fortress between her thinking and the prevailing mediocrity. It was in this way that she had offered herself this sanctuary in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a hotel between courtyard and garden where no one entered without her express consent. The rare letters that former colleagues or social relations persisted in addressing to her ended up in the fire without having been unsealed. She retained no bridge with her past. Her freedom of mind was total, absolute, almost brutal, dictated by the sole necessity of the work to be accomplished. Towards noon, Victoire put down her pen. The silence was broken by the slight rustling of a leaf that is being turned. Poupoune immediately opened a keen eye, stretched himself for a long time on his front legs and trotted towards his mistress, delicately placing his two front paws on Victoire's knee draped in dark wool. "Duty is calling us, Poupoune," she said in a breath, stroking the back of the animal's neck. It was time to leave Paris to return to the Landes. This regular coming and going between the capital, the Bois de Chalosse and the swell of Biarritz was the essential driving force of his writing, the ternary rhythm on which his life was based. The Chalosse estate awaited him under an autumn sky washed by recent showers. Located on the heights of a hillside overlooking the Adour basin, the eighteenth-century farmhouse, built of blond stones and covered with canal tiles patinated by the centuries, raised its reassuring mass at the end of an alley lined with pedunculate oaks. Here, the earth had a frank smell of dead leaves, rusty ferns and cut corn. Far from the hustle and bustle of Paris, the Chalosse offered Victoire an indispensable mineral and vegetal anchorage. It was the place of great structural work, the place where raw literary material was sifted through the sieve of logical demands. As soon as the wrought-iron gate closed, the outside world vanished. The inhabitants of the neighboring village, accustomed to the presence of this solitary woman who was said to be immensely rich and fearsomely educated, respected her reserve. No one dared to disturb her rest. In the large lower room paved with waxed terracotta tiles, where an imposing country fireplace stood, Victoire sat down every afternoon to organize the plan of her chapters. She worked with the meticulousness of an ancient geometer, using cardboard index cards to arrange each dramatic tension, calibrate each silence and weigh the scope of each metaphor. At her side, Poupoune explored the nooks and crannies of the park, chased after the blackbirds before warming his muzzle against his mistress's feet. In Chalosse, Victoire read without respite. She reread Thucydides for the purity of his analysis of political passions, Heraclitus for his vision of the universal flow, and Sophocles for the feeling of inevitability that governs the destiny of men. She recited the choruses of Antigone in a low voice, finding in the dactylic rhythm of Greek poetry a pulsation capable of ordering the chaos of the contemporary world. " There are many wonders in this world, but there is none greater than man ," she murmured, contemplating in the distance the bluish chain of the Pyrenees which cut out the southern horizon.