The Chalk Circle Man

‘What about Mathilde?’

‘If it wasn’t for Mathilde, monsieur, I’d still be waiting for a miracle down at the metro station. It’s lovely being here with her. I’d do anything to help Mathilde.’

Adamsberg didn’t try to disentangle all the contradictory messages he was getting. Mathilde had told him that Clemence could call something blue for an hour and red for the next hour, and made up stories about her life depending on who she was talking to. You would need to listen to Clemence for months before you could work out what it all meant. You’d need to be determined. Or a psychiatrist, some would say. But even that would be too late. Everything seemed to be too late for Clemence, that was clear enough, but somehow Adamsberg couldn’t feel sorry for her. Maybe Clemence did have some saving graces, give her the benefit of the doubt, but she wasn’t very appealing, so he wondered why Mathilde had felt like giving her lodgings in the first place, up there in the Stickleback, and then hiring her as an assistant. Now if there was a good person in the basic sense of the word, it was Mathilde. Haughty and sarcastic, but courteous and consumed with generosity. It struck you with violence in Mathilde, and more tenderly in Camille. Danglard, however, didn’t agree about Mathilde.

‘Does Mathilde have any children?’

‘A daughter, monsieur. Very beautiful. Would you like to see a photo?’

Suddenly Clemence had become genteel and respectful. It was perhaps time to take what he had come for, before her mood changed again.

‘No, no photos, please,’ said Adamsberg. ‘What about her friend, the philosopher, do you know him?’

‘You’re asking a lot of questions, monsieur. This isn’t getting Mathilde into trouble, is it?’

‘Not at all – on the contrary, so long as we can keep this confidential.’

This was the kind of police trick that Adamsberg disliked, but how else was he to answer questions like that? So he brought out his formulae like his multiplication tables, to move things on.

‘I’ve seen him twice,’ said Clemence with a touch of pride, dragging on her cigarette. ‘He wrote this.’

She spat out a few shreds of tobacco, reached over to the bookshelf and held out a thick book towards Adamsberg: The Subjective Zones of Consciousness by Real Louvenel. Real, that was a French-Canadian name. Adamsberg allowed a few recollections evoked by the name to swim up in his memory. None of them was very distinct.

‘He used to be a doctor,’ Clemence was saying in her distinctive closed-mouth way of speaking. ‘Supposed to be a great genius, I warn you. I don’t know if you’d be able to keep up with his talk. Not wanting to give offence, but you’ve got to be on the right wavelength to understand a word he says. Mathilde seems to know what he’s on about. What I can tell you is that he lives on his own with twelve Labradors. Imagine! Phew, his place must stink!’

Clemence had switched out of genteel mode. It hadn’t lasted. Now she was being the village idiot again. Then, suddenly, she came out with:

‘And what about you, anyway? This circle man, is that interesting? What do you want out of life? Are you in a mess, like everyone else?’

The old woman was going to unsettle Adamsberg soon, something that happened only rarely. Not that her questions embarrassed him. They were perfectly ordinary questions. He just found that everything about her made him uncomfortable: her clothes, her pinched lips, her hands in gloves so as not to smudge the slides, her weird bursts of conversation. If Mathilde was kind enough to rescue Clemence from her troubles, that was fine. But he didn’t want to be involved. He had the information he had come for, that would do. He withdrew, muttering a few polite words so as not to hurt her feelings.

Taking his time, Adamsberg looked up the address and phone number of Real Louvenel. A male voice, strident and highly strung, replied that he could see him that afternoon.

Real Louvenel’s house did indeed stink of dog. He was a man constantly in motion, so completely unable to sit for long in a chair that Adamsberg wondered how he managed to write anything at all. He found out afterwards that the philosopher dictated his books. Although he replied quite willingly to Adamsberg’s questions, Louvenel was doing half a dozen other things at the same time: emptying an ashtray, putting papers in the bin, blowing his nose, whistling to one of the dogs, strumming on the piano, doing up his belt another notch, sitting down, getting up again, closing the window, stroking the arm of his chair. A fly wouldn’t have been able to keep up with him, still less Adamsberg.

Adapting as best he could to this exhausting nervous energy, Adamsberg tried to register the information that emerged from Louvenel’s complex sentences, making strenuous efforts not to let himself be distracted by the sight of the philosopher as he ricocheted off all the surfaces of the room, or by the hundreds of photographs pinned to the walls, mostly representing litters of Labradors, or youths in a state of undress. He understood Louvenel to say that Mathilde would have been more eminent and a deeper thinker if she didn’t always allow her instincts to distract her from her original projects, and that they had known each other since their university days, when they’d sat together at lectures. Then he said that during the evening at the Dodin Bouffant she’d had a bit too much to drink, and had caused a sensation among the customers by saying that she and the chalk circle man were big pals, that only she and he understood anything about the ‘metaphorical renaissance of the pavement as a new field of scientific endeavour’. She had also announced that the wine was excellent and that she would like another glass, that she had dedicated her latest book to the chalk circle man, that his identity was no mystery to her, but that this man’s painful existence would remain a secret, a ‘Mathildism’. As it might be an ‘esoterism’. A ‘Mathildism’ was something she would tell nobody else about, though in any case it was of no intrinsic interest.

‘Since I couldn’t stop the flow, I left without hearing the end,’ Louvenel concluded. ‘I find Mathilde embarrassing when she’s had a few drinks. She gets boring, talkative, trying as hard as she can to get everyone to love her. Don’t ever let her start drinking when you’re with her.’

‘Did anyone else in the cafe seem particularly interested in what she was saying?’

‘I seem to recall that people were laughing.’

‘But why do you think Mathilde follows people in the street?’

‘The short answer could be that she collects oddities,’ said Louvenel, fiddling with the creases in his trousers and then with his socks. ‘You could say that these people she preys on are like her fish, she spots them in the street, she chases after them, then she pigeonholes them. But really it’s the opposite. Mathilde’s problem is that she’d be perfectly capable of going and living alone under the sea. Yes, she’s made it her life’s work, she’s a tireless researcher and a distinguished scientist, but all that means very little to her. The real draw is the territory she’s found for herself, underwater. Mathilde is the only deep-sea specialist I know who won’t let anyone accompany her – which is actually very dangerous. “I want to be afraid of everything, and understand everything for myself, Real, and to go down when I feel like it into a deep trench, into the origins of the Earth.” That’s how she is. Mathilde is a piece of the universe. Since she can’t dissolve into it, she’s made up her mind to study it, so as to grasp its hugest physical dimensions. But the ocean takes her away from human society, and she realises that. Because she’s also got a big slice of good-heartedness, or generosity if you like, that can’t be satisfied with the underwater life. So at regular intervals she comes back to the surface, and gives in to the other temptation, the one that draws her to people, I mean people, not humanity. So she makes her peace with all the millions of little steps people take as they tread the Earth’s crust. She takes everything to extremes, and every scrap of behaviour she can capture, wherever it is, seems a miracle to her. She memorises it all, she notes it all, she “Mathildises” it all. And she picks up lovers along the way, because she’s quite capable of love. And then when she’s tired of all that, when she thinks she has loved her fellow creatures enough, she goes diving again. That’s why she follows strangers in the street. To get a kick out of the flicker of someone’s eyelids or the twist of an elbow, before she goes off again to defy the immensity of the universe on her own.’

‘And what about you? Does the chalk circle man suggest anything to you?’

‘Don’t think I’m being arrogant, but I’m not interested in such infantile things. Even murder I consider infantile. Child-adults bore me, they’re cannibals. They’re fit only to feed off other people’s vitality. They can’t perceive themselves. And because they can’t perceive themselves, they can’t live unaided, they’re greedy for the sight and the blood of other people. Since they have no self-perception, they bore me. You may know that it is man’s self- perception that interests me – note that I’m saying perception, sensation, not understanding, or analysis – more than all other human approaches, even if I live from day-to-day expedients like everyone else. That’s all I can say about the chalk circle man and his murder, about which I know next to nothing anyway, except that Mathilde talks