His constant dissatisfaction, the feeling of missing something essential, was totally different from the ‘desire of the flesh’. Now and then the boy lay on the attic floor with his eyes closed and imagined himself dead. After a while, he felt something heavy pressing on his chest. He didn’t dare to open his eyes to see what weighed him down and waited for the pressure to disappear, which it usually did when he fell asleep and had violent dreams.
Alain went to the table and glanced again at the threatening lines of the poem.
He pressed the book to his belly. As a young child, his mother had frightened him out of his wits with tales about the devil. She breathed incense, that woman, and she had never hidden the fact that she resented him for having no sign of a ‘sacred calling’. Raoul’s de
