Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Not One Day

and another—who indeed became the chosen one, the happy recipient of Y*’s affection and confidence. It was as if *** had lifted a veil before your eyes. You had never seen things from that angle, that of rivalry, of conquest, of dominion. You had even lacked the ability to imagine things from such a perspective. (Did you know that the society in which you were (sometimes) living was still a court society? And that the Ancien Régime had never ended? Multiplied, displaced and diffracted, it reigned more supremely than ever.) There would have had to have been someone to show you the way, the goal. There would have had to have been someone exerting enough power over your imagination to lead it onto the path. Curious aporia… You would have needed the spiritual direction of an Abbot Herrera to point out for you the steep road of worldly ambition and deception. And even then… Your reading of the human comedy is quite queer. Sensitive, certainly, to the pleasure of intrigues, to the fantasies of power, to the mechanics of rivalries and jockeying for the upper hand, you fail, nevertheless, to identify and project yourself: mimesis, even wishing and willing to succumb to its power, does not inspire in you the desires of a Rastignac. Looking at the spectacle of this world, you can’t help but recognize, here there and everywhere, swarming around, the puppets of Balzacian passions. Politics, literature, management overflow with them. There is no career in all of Paris that

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