I was leaving behind that millennial Brittany, blessed by its granite, standing like a shoulder of eternity, and when the sky blazed with a burning red, resembling the wrapping of Fahrenheit, which dares to claim it can hold infinity in such a trifling glass bottle, I admired this spectacle of dawn. The roar of the engine and the hoarse power of the 530cc echoed through the narrow streets of Pleslin like thunder rising from the depths of the ages. I was heading back to the capital, and this departure reminded me of mornings from another life, when, thirty years earlier, I tore myself from the warmth of a bed to write to the one I had just left, as if a single hour of absence already carved the abyss of eternity.

The speed and the heat of the waning summer carried me to push the machine beyond the allowed limits, as though dawn itself stirred in me the urge to flee these three Breton months. Along the straights and the bends, I thought back to that dawn of my youth upon which I had invented the ghost of a woman to adore; and it was only at the dawn of my forties that I saw that phantom take flesh. Thus life forges in us invisible idols that we carry within until the day they deign to reveal themselves.

I return to this kingdom veiled with mute oracles where many suffer from dysorthography. Sham courtiers who claim to embody the eternity of fashion, though they are but provisional incarnations, suspended on the fragile thread of the seasons. Some bow before vanished Stylists as if before holy relics; others kneel before handbags, sorts of leather tabernacles chiseled by some Torquemada of luxury who toys with them.

In the curves of Domfront, I once again urged my steed forward, and my eyes rested upon the Romanesque church whose stones no longer celebrated God, but the pride of men and of Catherine de’ Medici, who still fuels debates over the extent of her responsibility in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. There, in the half-light, the silhouette of the Didier Grumlers drifted like the wake of a perfume too expensive ever to have kept a scent of honesty. Here I am already in Paris, a city wide open to traffic jams, carrying ten extra kilos, but what else is there to do while waiting for one’s beloved, if not to feed oneself and surrender to the excesses of Bacchus?

FM