burns; he now stands stripped to the waist, holding this improvised and short-lived torch and entrusting himself to it, not sure where it might take him. Who cares? He wasn’t crawling now, as if no longer afraid of falling, as if he couldn’t care less, he was hurrying along that path barely the width of two hands, lit by his shirt, which burned like a sheet of paper. Ashes fluttered away, butterflies of black silk so light they floated in the air around Paul d’Ampère, who talked to himself as he hurried on; a flood of words poured from his mouth, sometimes streams of furious syllables, sometimes a fluid melody or an overflowing torrent of eloquence which carried me along with it even though I didn’t catch a single word. Was this an epic in ancient Persian? One of Plato’s speeches in ancient Greek? Or a sacred writing in Tumchooq?
All of a sudden I was struck by three words in Chinese, “Cao ta ma!,” their long echo ringing round the mountain, endlessly repeated and merging into one. Not that I was surprised to hear him pronounce them without a shadow of an accent, but those three words that millions of Chinese utter every day, and I do too from time to time, were none other than a synonym for the swearing he had hurled out in French a few minutes earlier: “Shit! Shitting Hell!” Then I understood: he’d just shouted out the expression in every language—Asian, Indo-European, living, dead or dialectal—that he knew, an impetuous river of swear words pouring out in great roaring waves, beating against the rocks, crossing frontiers, roaming across continents, passing through Russia, Germany, Italy, detouring through Spain and Portugal, going back to his native country, taking in Corsican, Breton, Basque and the patois of the western Pyrenees … meanwhile, after his shirt, he held his trousers aloft and they burned with a feeble, flickering bluish flame just enough to probe the thick mist and light the other end of the path about twenty metres away, where a dark tree loomed and a bird, perhaps an eagle, called out, promising relief and deliverance.
Submerged by this flood of words, I wondered whether, during the course of his interminable prison sentence, Paul d’Ampère had toyed with the idea of creating a dictionary of swear words, listing them by country and region with phonetic variations, historical origins, linguistic mutations and degrees of vehemence, constituting a sort of “J’accuse” against all the injustices and tortures suffered in his long years of detention.
Then the filthy verbal diarrhoea came to an abrupt stop; I couldn’t hear anything, not even the sound of a fall, nothing but total silence in which his still-blazing trousers flew away, hovered for a moment, then went out completely, unleashing such a strong feeling of vertigo and terror in me that I felt I’d fallen off the edge of the cliff myself.
My eyes peered through the darkness, but to no avail, because they were clouded with tears. Then it started snowing in the mountains and I could already picture Paul d’Ampère being found by chance decades later, sleeping naked at the foot of the cliff, a pile of frozen, fractured bones and a pair of glasses with lenses held on by wire, and side-pieces once wrapped in dirty rags long since gone. I can’t think of another event in my life which provoked such emotion. There were tears streaming down my cheeks when I suddenly heard him swear again in French and saw him hanging on the edge of the cliff where his hands had managed, in the briefest fraction of a second during his fatal fall, to grab a tuft of grass rooted deeply in the ground. He didn’t dare move, afraid the least movement would make the grass give way, sending him into the unfathomable depths. He didn’t move but gave a cry, perhaps his last, which woke me from my dream …
The greengrocer’s shop was steeped in almost complete darkness, with the exception of a ray of bluish shadow between the bottom of the metal shutter and the threshold. It was still raining, outside and inside, dripping on the cucumbers, pumpkins and sweet potatoes with a duller echo than the noise it made on the spinach leaves, chives, chervil, dill and celery fronds, interrupted occasionally by the sound of Paul d’Ampère’s harrowing cry, which continued turning inside my head. Still, it wasn’t difficult overcoming my initial fear, because the image of that fall, I realised