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point or another: as with many children, it was dinosaurs that first fascinated him. His parents bought illustrated books for him, books “for his age group,” but he soon wanted more advanced material. When, aged nine, he saw an artist’s drawing in a newspaper, he was irritated by the anachronism of a pterodactyl wheeling above a herd of plateosauruses. Had he been abandoned in the middle of the Jurassic period he would easily have distinguished the very peaceful barosaurus from the no less placid camarasaurus. His family believed this was the start of a lasting interest, perhaps even a vocation, but after a visit to the botanical gardens, he turned his attention to carnivorous plants. Yves was immediately treated to his own hothouse, where for six months he fed a row of Venus flytraps on midges and crickets. Then came his hieroglyphics, cartouches, and reed pens period.
    Yves’s curiosity is still alert, insatiable. Over the years he has learned a great deal about Ethiopian wildlife, prehistoric population migration, the evolution of sentence structure in Flaubert’s work, the harmonics of baroque scales, the early centuries of the Catholic Church, the poetry of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, successive theories of color, the effects of gravitational pull close to black holes, the history of bebop and after-hours jazz, the logic of symbiotic relationships, unified theories of the universe, and even how to solve differential equations. Each area of research has him in its clutches for a few weeks, sometimes months. He buys books that give an overview, until he is irritated at having to reread in one a concept already explained in another, then he launches into understanding more detailed points. He turns his back on a subject once he has learned agreat deal about it, and a new passion takes possession of him. He forgets a huge amount, he realizes that. So, anything he wants to use, such as Broca’s area which controls speech, he notes down so as not to forget, or rather so he can forget it. What he does remember is too often anecdotal. But then what is knowledge for a lot of people if not an organized accumulation of anecdotes?
    Occasionally, if an inquisitive stranger—a taxi driver, a provincial hairdresser, a fellow passenger on a train—should ask him about his life, Yves invents a profession and constructs a life for himself, with the perfect impunity of anonymity. He fictionalizes out of courtesy, almost out of discretion. It is an opportunity to inventory his areas of expertise, to structure them for the sake of civilized conversation. He even tries to inspire the person he is talking to, coloring his voice with a genuine passion. Just for as long as it takes for the taxi to reach Place d’Italie—by the time they pass the rue Montmartre, he is one of Europe’s leading authorities on cryptobiosis in tardigrades.
    “On what in what?” says the driver.
    “Cryptobiosis in tardigrades. Tardigrades are tiny invertebrates, no bigger than a pinhead. They can expel all the water from their bodies to withstand extreme temperatures in the Antarctic: that’s what cryptobiosis is. They can survive in that state for many years, centuries even. I’ve been studying them for twenty-two years now.”
    “Are we paying you for this out of our taxes?” the driver asks anxiously.
    “Oh … I see …,” says Yves. Then his voice becomes more crisp, as would be appropriate for an offended researcher: “But, you see, if you’re told you have cancer, which I hope you aren’t, but let’s say you are, and I work out how to keep you alivein a frozen state until a cure is found for this bastard cancer, you won’t mind funding my little salary all the years I’ve been studying tardigrades.”
    “Yeah, okay, true enough,” admits the now reassured, taxpaying driver. “So what are they called, tradigrades, did you say?”
    “Tardi. Tardigrades. And cryptobiosis.”
    “Cryptobosis,” the driver repeats meekly,