Enough About Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

anyone else. Some cry “Bravo” but he is crying “Thank you, thank you.” The young man’s name is Romain, Romain Vidal. He does not yet know Louise, he will meet her properly for the first time later, by chance. He came to the law courts to listen to lawyers jousting, for the fun of it. He does not know it yet, but he is applauding his wife.
    As for Louise, the only Jewish thing about her is her name. Her paternal grandfather, Robert Blum, was raised a Jew but had little interest in faith, and married a pretty Breton girl,Françoise Le Guérec. Louise’s grandmother was charming but a bigot, and raised her two sons as Christians: in vain, for Augustin Blum, who doubted anyone could really walk on water or multiply loaves of bread, gave Louise and her sister a perfectly secular upbringing. But this grandfather whose name she bears, this Jew originally from Berlin who survived the roundup at the Vel d’Hiv 2 and died when she was only eight, has always fascinated Louise. Her performance at the Berryer would be the final eruption of his identity.
    2. The Velodrôme d’Hiver was a cycling stadium in Paris where, in July 1942, thirteen thousand Jews were rounded up, to be sent to the camp at Drancy.

YVES
• • •
    A T AGE THREE , little Yves could read. The child was looking over his grandfather’s shoulder when he asked what the word “Kennedy” meant (the article was about the revolution in Cuba). The grandfather immediately picked up the telephone to call his daughter: “You’ll never believe this! Your little Yves! He can read!”
    At every important family gathering, Yves, eyes lowered and cheeks flushed with embarrassment, had to suffer the retelling of this “Kennedy affair,” glorified by his triumphantly proud mother.
    Learning to write took him longer. He made few mistakes, but his writing was untidy, his letters irregular. From the age of twelve, Yves always kept a pad in his pocket. He would jot down a sentence overheard, a few lines of poetry, a new word that intrigued him. This urge to copy things down would never leave him. Soon afterward he kept notebooks, writing poemsand short stories in them. It was only at thirty-two, the day after his daughter Julie was born, that he threw away the boxes filled with his early writings. No feeling of regret ever materialized.
    Yves Janvier is walking through Paris with a new notebook in his pocket. The one he has now is light and hardcover, in black leather. This model usually lasts a couple of months. As he crosses the Île de la Cité and the flower market, he writes a few cramped, uneven, sloping lines, which he will have trouble reading when he comes to type them on the computer:
    A passerby stops beside a painter in the Fontainebleau forest. The painter is Jean-Baptiste Corot. Find a date: 1855, 1860? The passerby looks at the painting, recognizes the fir trees in it, the silver birches, but, in the view before him, he cannot see the pond with twinkling water from the middle of the painting. He asks Corot where the pond is. Corot doesn’t even turn around but replies: “It’s behind me.” A parable. But about what? Maybe just tell it without relating it to anything.
    His notebook contains other, more incomprehensible notes.
    “Jupiter’s moons. Twelve. Some can be seen with the naked eye.” And “Being on the crest. Climbing up from the valley to be on the crest. No interest in the mountain per se.”
    A few pages earlier, Yves Janvier also noted:
    “What is it about the rain I like so much?”
    “Why have I always hated having my picture taken?”
    “We talk about overwhelmed and underwhelmed, but is anyone ever whelmed?”
    “The left cerebral hemisphere controls speech (Paul Broca).”
    “Abkhazian dominoes, the only game of dominoes where, if you can’t play, you are allowed to pick up a domino that’s already on the board.”
    It will all be useful, perhaps.
    It is worth listing the things that were sources of interest to Yves at one