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his time; I imagine the audience that he cared about, that he hoped to beguile, was not the mass of strangers today’s writer covets but the little company of people he might know personally and respect. The pleasure he derived from success among his readers was not very different from the sort he might experience among the few listeners gathered around him in a salon where he was scintillating.
    There was one kind of fame from before the invention of photography, and another kind thereafter. The Czech king Wenceslaus, in the fourteenth century, liked to visit the Prague inns and chat incognito with the common folk. He had power, fame, liberty. Prince Charles of England
    has no power, no freedom, but enormous fame: neither in the virgin forest nor in his bathtub hidden away in a bunker seventeen stories underground can he escape the eyes that pursue and recognize him. Fame has devoured all his liberty, and now he knows: that only totally unconscious people could willingly consent these days to trail the pots and pans of celebrity along behind them. You say that though the nature of fame changes, this still concerns only a few privileged persons. You’re mistaken. For fame concerns not only the famous people, it concerns everyone. These days, famous people are in magazines, on television screens, they invade everyone’s imagination. And everyone considers the possibility, be it only in dreams, of becoming the object of such fame (not the fame of King Wenceslaus who went visiting taverns but that of Prince Charles hidden away in his bathtub seventeen stories underground). The possibility shadows every single person and changes the nature of his life; for (and this is another well-known axiom of existential mathematics) any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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    His silence upset her, and in the next letter she reminded him of the astounding number of love notes he had written her. In one of them he had called her “bird of night that troubles my dreams.” That line, since forgotten, struck him as unbearably stupid, and he thought it discourteous of her to remind him of it. Later, according to rumors reaching him, he understood that each time he appeared on television, that woman he had never managed to stain was babbling at dinner somewhere about the innocent love of the famous Berck, who once upon a time couldn’t sleep because she troubled his dreams. He felt naked and defenseless. For the first time in his life, he felt an intense desire for anonymity.
    In a third letter, she asked him a favor; not for herself but for her neighbor, a poor woman who had got very bad care in a hospital; not only had she nearly died from a mishandled anesthesia, but she was being refused the slightest compensation. If Berck went to such pains for African children, let him prove he could take some interest in ordinary people in his own country, even if they didn’t give him an opportunity for strutting on television.
    Then the woman herself wrote him, using
    Pontevin might be less harsh about Berck if he were aware of the troubles the intellectual recently had to endure from a certain Immaculata, an old schoolmate, whom, as a kid, he used to covet in
    vain.
    One day some twenty years later, Immaculata saw Berck on the television screen, shooing flies from the face of a little black girl; the sight hit her as a kind of illumination. She instantly understood that she had always loved him. That very day, she wrote him a letter in which she recalled their “innocent love” of long ago. But Berck remembered perfectly that, far from being innocent, his love had been whoppingly lustful and that he had felt humiliated when she ruthlessly rejected him. This was in fact the reason why, inspired by the slightly comical name of his parents’ Portuguese maid, he had at the time given her the nickname, at once sardonic and rueful, of Immaculata, the Unstained. He reacted