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the utter futility of his quest, since the brilliantly original method by which he himself has contrived to dispose of his rivals is shown to be exactly that which was posited by Poe.
    In, I would say, his early fifties, the totally bald Sanary resembled, with his poached-egg eyes and pale thin legalistic lips, a transvestite whose wig has just been snatched off. I had met him through my close friendship with the Chilean, Paris-based film director Raoul Ruiz, who had long and in vain nurtured the project of a cinematic adaptation of
Fin
. We had both been invited to supper at Raoul’s flat near the Père-Lachaise cemetery and, even if Sanary displayed scant interest in anything I contributed to the table-talk and none at all in what I had achieved in my professional life, he himself proved to be so amazingly incapable of making a dull remark I could almost forgive his boorish manners. He had an inexhaustible pool of anecdotes and allegations involving instances of witting or unwitting aesthetic plagiarisms which he would serve up to us with a series of meaningful leers. He informed us, for example, that the out-of-control-carousel climax of Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train,
absent from Patricia Highsmith’s source novel, had been appropriated,
soi-disant
‘Hitchcockian’ touches and all, from Edmund Crispin’s donnish Oxford-set whodunit
The Moving
Toyshop,
published in 1945 and therefore predating the film by six years. Also that the plot of Cocteau’s pretty much forgotten boulevard play
Les Monstres sacrés
(1940) was too similar to that of the still remembered and indeed cherished Joseph L. Mankiewicz film
All About Eve
(1950) for it to have been a coincidence. Also, most intriguingly, that in the first movement, with a reprise in the third, of a Sonata for Violin and Piano composed in the twenties by the Russian-born pianist and conductor Issay Dobrowen there can be heard a tune indistinguishable from ‘As Time Goes By’, which was reputedly conceived a decade later by one Herman Hupfeld and of course immortalised in the film
Casablanca.
    As for another of the Festival’s invited speakers, Meredith van Demarest, I cannot honestly say that it was with much enthusiasm that I anticipated meeting her again. A hellish Hellenist from an obscure Californian college, she had sat next to me at a lunch in Antibes to which I had been invited by friends of friends many years ago, all the other guests being left-wing American academics spending their sabbaticals in sexy France rather than in dreary England, even though it was the latter country’s language and literature most of them were being paid to teach.
    She and I had got on well enough to begin with, in a discussion about some new French films which had just beenreleased after the long hot hiatus of summer. Yet, even then, I couldn’t quite suppress the conviction that the almost overplayed attention she paid to my opinions derived not from any intrinsic interest they held for her but from her own avid consumption, to which she had slightly shamefacedly admitted, of gossipy literary biographies. My belief was that what she extrapolated from these was above all the fact that the secret of their subjects’ success as conversationalists had resided less in what they themselves had had to say, however witty, than in the flattering intensity with which they had attended to the discourses, however trite, of their gratified interlocutors. Thus, whenever it was my turn to speak, she would peer into my eyes as though nothing in the world mattered more to her at that instant than my recommendation of Resnais or Rohmer (Eric not Sax).
    Since this was 2001, however, and mid-September to boot, the conversation had inevitably turned to the Twin Towers attack, which had taken place just five days before. Speaking about the atrocity and its global implications – and I acknowledge I was a touch, shall we say, premature – I had bemoaned the fact that the military reprisals we