The Elegance of the Hedgehog (20 page)

A
t seven A.M. that morning someone rings the bell at my loge. It takes me a few seconds to emerge from the void. Two hours of sleep do not leave a person feeling terribly well-disposed toward mankind, and the ringing that persists as I hastily throw on my dress and slippers and run my hand through my curiously puffy hair does little to stimulate my altruism.

I open the door and find myself face to face with Colombe Josse.

“Well,” she says, “were you caught in a traffic jam?”

I cannot believe what I am hearing.

“It is seven in the morning,” I say.

She looks at me.

“Yes, I know,” she says.

“The loge opens at eight,” I explain, making a great effort at self-control.

“What do you mean, at eight?” she asks, looking shocked. “There are hours?”

No, a concierge’s loge is a protected sanctuary, oblivious of either social progress or labor laws.

“Yes,” I say, incapable of another word.

“Oh,” she replies in a lazy voice. “Well, since I’m already here . . . ”

“ . . . you can stop by later.” I slam the door in her face and make a beeline for the kettle.

Through the windowpane I hear her shout, “Well! That takes the cake!” then turn furiously on her heels and press all her rage into the button to call the elevator.

Colombe is the elder Josse daughter. Colombe Josse is also a sort of tall blond leek who dresses like a penniless Bohemian. If there is one thing I despise, it is the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes, ill-fitting gray wool bonnets, socks full of holes, and flowered shirts under threadbare sweaters. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man’s scorn for a poor man’s longing.

Unfortunately, Colombe Josse also happens to be a brilliant student. This autumn she enrolled in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure.

I make my tea with some cherry plum jam cookies, and try to master the trembling rage afflicting my hands, while an insidious headache worms its way into my brain. I take an exasperated shower, get dressed, bestow an absolutely abject meal upon Leo (headcheese and damp leftover cheese rind), go out into the courtyard, take out the garbage, remove Neptune from the garbage can room and, by eight o’clock, weary of all this to and fro, I repair to my kitchen, not the least bit calmer for all that.

The Josse family also have a younger daughter, Paloma, who is so discreet and diaphanous that I have the impression I never see her, although she does go out to school every day. But lo and behold it is Paloma who, at eight on the dot, shows up as Colombe’s envoy.

What a cowardly trick.

The poor child (how old is she? eleven? twelve?) is standing on my doormat, stiff as justice. I take a deep breath—I would not want to transfer the rage inspired by the evil onto the innocent—and try to smile as naturally as possible.

“Good morning, Paloma.”

She fiddles hesitantly with the bottom of her pink vest.

“Good morning.” Her voice is reedy.

I look at her carefully. How could I have missed this? Some children have the awkward talent of intimidating adults; nothing in their behavior corresponds to the standards of their age group. They are too serious, too imperturbable and, at the same time, terribly sharp. Yes, sharp. If I observe Paloma carefully, I detect a trenchant acuity, a chilly wise way about her, which I suppose I had always taken for reserve simply because it was impossible for me to imagine that the flighty Colombe could have a Judge of Humanity for a sister.

“My sister Colombe has sent me to alert you to the fact that she is expecting the delivery of a very important envelope,” says Paloma.

“Very well,” I reply, mindful not to soften my own tone the way adults do when they speak to children—something which, in the end, is as much an indication of scorn as rich people wearing poor people’s rags.

“She asks if you can bring it up to the house,” continues Paloma.

“Yes.”

And she goes on standing there.

This is all very interesting.

She goes on standing there, staring at me calmly, without moving, her arms by her side, her lips slightly parted. She has skinny braids, glasses with pink frames, and very large light eyes.

“Would you like a cup of hot chocolate?” I ask, running out of ideas.

She nods, as imperturbable as ever.

“Come in, I was just having some tea.”

And I leave the door to the loge open, to avert any accusations of child abduction.

“I prefer tea myself, if you don’t mind,” she says.

“No, not at all,” I reply, somewhat surprised, observing mentally that a certain amount of data is being stored: the Judge of Humanity, in a nice turn of phrase, prefers tea.

She sits on a chair and swings her feet in the void, looking at me while I pour out her jasmine tea. I put the cup down before her, and sit down with my own cup.

“Every day I do something so that my sister will think I’m a retard,” she declares after taking a connoisseur’s long swallow. “My sister spends entire evenings with her friends drinking and smoking and talking as if she were an underprivileged kid from the projects, because she thinks her intelligence is beyond question . . . ”

Which seems to fit very squarely with the girl’s no-fixed-abode sense of style.

“I am here as her envoy because she’s a coward and a chicken,” continues Paloma, still staring at me with her big clear eyes.

“Well, it’s given us the opportunity to get acquainted,” I say politely.

“May I come back?” she asks, and there is something of an entreaty in her voice.

“Of course,” I say, “you’re more than welcome. But I’m afraid you’ll find it boring here, there’s not much to do.”

“I just want a place where I can have some peace,” she responds.

“Can’t you have some peace in your own room?”

“No, there’s no peace if everyone knows where I am. Before, I used to hide. But now they’ve found out all my hiding places.”

“You know, people are constantly disturbing me too. I don’t know how much peace and quiet you’ll find here.”

“I could stay there.” (She points to the armchair by the television, which is on with the sound turned off.) “People come to see you, they won’t bother me.”

“It’s fine with me, but first you will have to ask your mother if she agrees.”

Manuela, who starts her service at half-past eight, pops her head in at the open door. She is about to say something when she sees Paloma with her steaming cup of tea.

“Come in,” I say, “we were just having some tea and a little chat.”

Manuela raises an eyebrow, which means, in Portuguese at least, What is she doing here? I give a faint shrug. She purses her lips, puzzled.

“Well?” she asks all the same, incapable of waiting.

“Will you stop by later?” I ask with a huge smile.

“Ah,” she says, seeing my smile, “very good, very good, yes, I’ll come back, the usual time.”

Then, looking at Paloma:

“Fine, I’ll come back later.”

And, politely:

“Good bye, Mademoiselle.”

“Good bye,” says Paloma, with her first, faint, smile, a poor little out-of-practice smile that breaks my heart.

“You must go on home now,” I say. “Your family will be getting worried.”

She stands up and heads for the door, dragging her feet.

“It is patently clear,” she says, “that you are very intelligent.”

And since I am too taken aback to say anything else:

“You have found a good hiding place.”

T
he envelope that the courier drops off at my loge for Her Majesty Colombe de la Riffraff is open.

Wide open, without ever having been sealed closed. The adhesive flap still has its white protective strip and the envelope is gaping open like an old shoe, revealing a pile of sheets bound together with a spiral.

Why did no one take the trouble to close it, I wonder, eliminating the hypothesis of trust in the integrity of couriers and concierges, and assuming, rather, a belief that the contents of the envelope could hardly be of interest to them.

I swear on all the saints that this is the first time, and I can only pray that the facts (little sleep, summer rain, Paloma, and so on) will be taken into consideration.

Very gently I remove the pile from its envelope.

Colombe Josse,
The Argument of Potentia Dei Absoluta
, Master’s Thesis under the Direction of Professor Marian, University of Paris I—Sorbonne.

There is a card clipped to the first page:

Dear Colombe Josse,
Here are my notes. Thank you for the courier.
I will see you at the Saulchoir tomorrow.
Regards,
J. Marian

In the introduction I discover that the topic is medieval philosophy. It is, moreover, a thesis on William of Ockham, a Franciscan monk, philosopher and logician of the fourteenth century. As for the Saulchoir, it is a library of “religious and philosophical sciences” in the 13th arrondissement, run by Dominican monks. The library has a considerable collection of medieval literature including, I’ll wager, the complete works of William of Ockham, in Latin, in fifteen volumes. How do I know this? Well, I went there a few years ago. For what purpose? None in particular. I had found this library on a map of Paris and it seemed to be open to the public so I went there as a collector. I wandered up and down between the stacks, which were set far apart and peopled exclusively by very learned old gentlemen or students with pretentious airs about them. I have always been fascinated by the abnegation with which we human beings are capable of devoting a great deal of energy to the quest for nothing and to the rehashing of useless and absurd ideas. I spoke with a young doctoral candidate in Greek patristics and wondered how so much youth could be squandered in the service of nothingness. When you consider that a primate’s major preoccupations are sex, territory and hierarchy, spending one’s time reflecting on the meaning of prayer for Augustine of Hippo seems a relatively futile exercise. To be sure, there are those who will argue that mankind aspires to meaning beyond mere impulses. But I would counter that while this is certainly true (otherwise, what am I to do with literature?), it is also utterly false: meaning is merely another impulse, an impulse carried to the highest degree of achievement, in that it uses the most effective means—understanding—to attain its goals. For the quest for meaning and beauty is hardly a sign that man has an elevated nature, that by leaving behind his animal impulses he will go on to find the justification of his existence in the enlightenment of the spirit: no, it is a primed weapon in the service of a trivial and material goal. And when the weapon becomes its own subject, this is the simple consequence of the specific neuronal wiring that distinguishes us from other animals; by allowing us to survive, the efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation, thought without usefulness, and beauty without purpose. It’s like a computer bug, a consequence without consequence of the subtlety of our cortex, a superfluous perversion making an utterly wasteful use of the means at its disposal.

But even when the quest does not wander off in this way, it remains a necessity that does not depart from animality. Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature’s mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable. For a creature like man, who must forge his destiny by means of thought and reflexivity, the knowledge gained from this will perforce be unbearably lucid. We know that we are beasts who have this weapon for survival, and that we are not gods creating a world with our own thoughts, and something has to make our own wisdom bearable, something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny.

Therefore, we have invented Art: our animal selves have devised another way to ensure the survival of our species.

Truth loves nothing better than simplicity of truth: that is the lesson Colombe Josse ought to have learned from her medieval readings. But all she seems to have gleaned from her studies is how to make a conceptual fuss in the service of nothing. It is a sort of endless loop, and also a shameless waste of resources, including the courier and my own self.

I leaf through pages that contain scarcely any comments, although this must be a final version, and am filled with dismay. Granted, the young woman has a fairly efficient way with words, despite her youth. But the fact that the middle classes are working themselves to the bone, using their sweat and taxes to finance such pointless and pretentious research leaves me speechless. Every gray morning, day after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen, employees, petty civil servants, taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burden so that the flower of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the altar of ridiculous endeavors.

And yet, at the outset Colombe’s thesis has every reason to be enthralling:
Do universals exist, or only singular things?
is the question to which, I gather, William of Ockham devoted most of his life. I am fascinated by his query: is each thing an individual entity—if so, whatever is identical from one thing to another is merely an illusion or an effect of language, proceeding through words and concepts, through generalities designating and embracing several particular things—or
do general forms truly exist
, of which singular things are but a part, and not the mere result of language? When we say “a table,” when we utter the word “table,” when we make the concept of the table, are we still designating only this table or are we truly referring to a universal table entity that establishes the reality of all the particular tables that exist? Is the
idea
of the table real, or does it merely belong to the mind? If that is so, then why are certain objects identical? Is it language that is grouping them together artificially into general categories, for the convenience of human understanding, or does a universal form exist to which every specific form belongs?

As far as Will of Ockham is concerned, things are singular, and the realism of universals is erroneous. There are only particular realities, generality is merely in the mind and to presume that generic realities exist is merely to make what is simple complicated. But can we be so sure? Was I not seeking congruence between Raphael and Vermeer only yesterday? The eye recognizes a shared form to which both belong, and that is Beauty. And I daresay there must be reality in that form, it cannot be a simple expedient of the human mind classifying in order to understand, and discerning in order to apprehend: for you cannot classify something that is not classifiable, you cannot put things together that cannot be together in a group, or gather those that cannot be gathered. A table can never be a
View of Delft
: the human mind cannot create this dissimilarity, any more than it can invent the deep solidarity connecting a Dutch still life to an Italian Virgin and Child. In every table there is an essence that gives it its form and, similarly, every work of art belongs to a universal form that alone confers its seal upon the work. To be sure, we cannot perceive this universality directly: that is one of the reasons why so many philosophers have balked at considering essences to be real, for I will only ever see the table that is before me, and not the universal “table” form; only the painting, and not the very essence of Beauty. And yet . . . and yet it is there, before our eyes: every painting by a Dutch master is an incarnation of Beauty, a dazzling apparition that we can only contemplate through the singular, but that opens a tiny window onto eternity and the timelessness of a sublime form.

Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it.