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These pages are rightfully mine, as far as they can be possessed, and there is no reason to delay my clear identification of myself as the author, once and for all—that is, simply to refer the reader back to the words on the cover of the work being held in her eager, if still hesitant, hands.

We exchange words of welcome . . . enchanté . . . pleased to meet you . . . We understand each other this way, and everyone plays his own uninterchangeable role. If my name is on the cover, the ex libris, on the inside, bears the name of the reader. I won’t reveal this name—with a little luck, there may be several. Yes, let’s tell each other these pleasant things, before the hostilities begin.

In this age, when historical research has been carried to such a pitch, it wasn’t my lot to discover—almost miraculously—a manuscript still completely unknown. Nobody came to ring my doorbell or rap at my window, no peculiar individuals with eight-day beards, holding bundles of papers under their arms—bequeathed to them by some friendly hand under circumstances worthy of a novel. No, fortune didn’t drop an elderly doctor in my lap, in possession of a lead case, which he’d claim to have unearthed in the foundations of an ancient hermitage during its restoration. It’s quite unlikely that these pages were found at a rummage sale of manuscripts and old papers, since I conceived of them myself. It’s even less likely that I uncovered them in a cottage in a rather remote corner of the kingdom of Aragon, since I mulled over them for a long time, cast them as fastidiously as one would cement, happily covering them with ink, and always fine-tuning them. No, I didn’t dig these pages up in an unused soup kettle, a bathtub-turned-storage-locker, or in the back corner of some musty shed; nor did I find them in a hat, on the banks of the grassy waters of the Marne, on January 11, 1904. I did not want to insert my own words, thus impairing the somewhat corrosive grace of the so-called journal of some chambermaid. I did not have to ask, as recompense for my pains, permission to cut anything which, in my opinion, might not be to the purpose. I did not wait, rooted to the ground, for a mysterious correspondent to send documents to me, enjoining me to prepare henceforth a typescript in accordance with the guidelines for publication, but without allowing anything to be printed before a strict delay was observed. No, these lines were not found among the papers of some traveler in Central Europe, North Africa, or the Far East, who is reputed to have settled in Bouville three years ago to conclude his historical research on the Marquis de Rollebon.

In light of this fact, which I now believe to be well established, I will not hide behind the fallacious label of “Editor.” I will seek out a different model for that indispensable precaution, the initial formula of fiction—carrying, inside, its seed of doubt, hopefully delicious, as well as its poison. And if there’s poison, I’d like to rid it of any trace of bitterness.

This novel being a work of fiction, and this work of fiction being a novel, it would hardly be absurd to assume that the author ought to be held accountable for the consequences of any potential, apparent resemblances in his text to places, exclamations, words, gesticulations, or people belonging not to his story but, accidentally, to reality. Shall we all agree here and now that the orchard of coincidence won’t produce any of its infamous fruits this year? If such a contract ordinarily goes without saying, giving it voice here will hardly make it any less binding. In case of any dissatisfaction, please direct all complaints to the author, rather than his characters, which latter have no more claim to the title of saint than the former has to that of an “almighty” God.

These few prefatory lines, which—like those that follow—were by no means dug up in Ile de France at the foot of an old clock tower, in a little house, in a locked attic, in the secret compartment of a trunk where they had been deposited by a Spanish prisoner . . . These lines, which are not from a manuscript written in Newgate Prison and dropped by chance into my hands, to be polished and perfected, by a fleeing madman . . . These lines, I say, are no longer prefatory lines or pages. There’s no reason to believe they were written in 1827. They weren’t drafted by a certain Captain Georges, who would have liked for one of his crewmen to read them. These pages are neither discolored nor effaced, they haven’t been mutilated in any way, aren’t preceded by the words “preface,” “foreword,” or “note to the reader”; not even by the word “prologue,” which I did consider momentarily. They won’t be interrupted by any interludes, because each one, except the first and the last, already serves as an interlude between two others. They are all already part of the murky disarray that will, necessarily, add another little burden—that of having to synthesizing things seen with things imagined—to the shoulders of their readers, most of whom don’t give a good goddamn about them. And if these words are meant to hold their clients’ attention, if they’ve been even slightly successful up to this point, it would hardly be prudent to waste this advantage by inserting a big blank space, or even a page break—or a “Chapter Two,” never having been announced by a “Chapter One”—instead of entering into my narrative without any further ado: thus, in medias res, at a point in this story that’s neither at the beginning nor the end, and not a random occurrence but an intentional act, taking place behind a certain individual’s brow, as well as beneath his pen, tracing first the word This, then the word is, then the two words my last, followed by still others, making up: This is my last will and testament, revoking all prior wills and codicils . . . It bequeaths nothing of any value to anyone, but is a simple testimonial—duly authorized and, perhaps, final.

No, the civilization that had cultivated Paul, the civilization that had cultivated me, me, no longer held me dear—it hadn’t for quite a while, and didn’t care about what I meant to offer it in return.

I was, however, civilized, and my ancestors as well, from Paul to Paul, since the very beginning of all the centuries my memory had accumulated. I folded my lettuce without tearing the leaf and peeled my pear with a fork and a knife.

Too young, I had started out in finance, at the very bottom of the ladder and, never having found a reason to explore the higher rungs, I remained a little account-book rat with his incisors in the flesh of his bread.

I was a man still in a formative state.

When the time came, I served my country in the navy, mostly working with machines in the lower decks when, earlier, I had dreamed of being up in the crow’s nest. I was honest with my superiors, courteous with my peers. There was never anyone under my own command.

For a long time, from the day I first had to earn a living—an obligation forced upon me too early by the death of my parents—I never stopped chasing after every three sous, and soon I had one, then two, then three, then four, then five, then six children to share them with. Six kids, and more than enough. Each of them had the appetite of twelve and each was bigger than the last, growing exponentially.

Pauline, my wife, didn’t waste any time in declaring me a lost cause, deciding I’d wronged her and that I hadn’t been there for her when she needed me. She never went back on this judgment. May her still-living (I imagine) body rest in peace. And may her embittered spirit rest in peace as well.

My case was calamitous, yes, but not right from the beginning.

I was born in a passably favorable region, an Anjou halfway between city and country, where a fire in a factory would result in the rehiring of its workers in order to rebuild it. The owner would tighten his belt a little and, two or three years later, prosperity would return. At least that’s what was said publicly; it was a gross overgeneralization. It was a harsh world, but not lacking in courage and civic-mindedness—qualities I was determined to lose, since it’s a known fact that the people who are usually the first to benefit from them are the same ones who consider their absence a virtue.

My father was a clerk in the civil service and played the horses.

Severe and unyielding, my mother had, very distantly, the blood of certain South American tropical countries in her veins, a fact that she kept hidden, as though it was a terrible disgrace. Of course she wasn’t as severe as all that. I never once succeeded in getting her to talk about her early childhood, nor speak in the language she probably spoke as a child. I am able to deduce with some certainty that Spanish was her first language, but I never knew for sure. I was never allowed to probe further. It didn’t matter to my father that she wasn’t an Anjou native, but nonetheless, he never revealed her deception when she shamelessly indulged in it, saying she was born in Feneu and raised in Ponts de Cé.

My father died of pneumonia after a trip into the wine cellar. His wife, my mother, though she was a more moderate drinker, followed in his footsteps, faithful to the last.

As far as money went, my inheritance was a trench of debt. I hadn’t expected it would be quite so bad. In the presence of the notary, there was nothing I could do but sign away what little had been left to me—something that can’t be done without at least a symbolic sense of bitterness. I read ferocity in the notary’s words and contempt in his handshake.

I had no brothers or sisters. I became free and without estate.

After a few years of purely vegetative survival in a hovel paid for by the civil service, I finally pulled myself together with a violence born of conviction—even if this conviction was founded on a gaping question rather than a solid answer. If I abandoned the lower ranks of a mediocre career in finance with excessive haste, it was only because I had some new ideas and perspectives in the works.

“What, at this point in time, can we make of a man?” That was the question I continually asked my friends and myself. Every moment in the world is always accepted by the masses as a relatively definitive fact. Man as a species is at an impasse. Whether this or that individual is comfortable (I won’t even say “happy”) in light of these circumstances is another affair, clearly more nebulous. There are only a few learned people who might think the world might be otherwise, a few doctors not resigned to this or that decrepitude, a few revolutionaries, like my great-aunt Flora Tristan, who didn’t have Isolde’s beauty, even though I wished it for her.

You can see that I learned to speak the French of France and the Loire Valley, and to write testamentary French, so belabored and placid it could make death itself sound unimportant (isn’t it, after all, a fairly common occurrence?)—otherwise, my testament would be written in pidgin French, a language that I also conquered, as the reader will see, if the coursing of my blood, the pump (and pomp) that drives it, give me enough time to tell all.

What, at this point in time, can we make of a man?

I repeat this question, which I’ve asked myself many times—not only yesterday, but often, on my way to Peru and back by boat; and there among the miners, in my shiny office, smelling of ink and old paper; and among my children, from whom my only thought was to flee toward endless barroom arguments—verbal jousts that take place far from children and virtuous women.

What, now, can I make of a man, in the time allotted for the feat assigned to me?

It could be a poet’s question, or the question of a novelist, full of ambition and unfinished chapters, or a dramatist capable of writing a five-act play. Literature was a domain I considered more within my reach than science or de-utopified socialism. My attempts were disastrous. I left The Urban Adventures of Sebastien Froissart unfinished, which—had I had the tenacity to lay out the consequences of my first axioms and get beyond the inevitable reactions of the bourgeoisie—would have amply addressed the tendentious subject of a workers’ republic. But I lacked the courage to really destroy a world after having built a new one. It didn’t stand up. I changed tone on immersing myself in the battle of the social classes, not really knowing to which I belonged. I dashed off a pitiful yet edifying tale in the Hugolian manner of Poor Folk, which was quickly trumped by Baudelaire’s reading in “Assommons les Pauvres!” And to top it all off, I purely and simply gave up on a play I’d been writing that was meant to be performed in installments—a kind of theatrical equivalent to the step-by-step gait of a newspaper serial—which I had entitled The Nouvist Man: a different act would be turned in every evening for the actors of the Boulevard Saint-Martin, ten minutes of theater that would be added on to the preceding acts and grow like an infinite rosary. I lost myself in the Nouvist caravan and soon my ten fingers ceased production, stopped any sort of written invention, and quietly returned to their shoddily patched pockets.

It is in this context that my trip to Peru took place; it was stupidly undertaken because of the ramblings—as unverified as unverifiable—of a mining engineer, also from Anjou, who was dreaming of a certain yellow metal. Six months of wandering and fevers ended with the burial of my engineer, dead along with his entire family, having caught a fever even yellower than his dream. I wasn’t cut out to be a miner, even under the open sky, even of gold.

And even supposing I went to the Americas in search of my mother’s roots (which I acknowledged only with repugnance), it was a lot of trouble for nothing. I ended up deciding it was more likely that she was only from Extremadura or Galicia. I stopped thinking about it.