Room 18, Hostellerie de la Mer, Le Fret (Crozon) - Olivier Rolin, Hotel Crystal (pp. 31-33, 2004)

A pleasing lullaby is indeed what we needed, my old master Louis Althusser and I, on the night we spent in room 18 of the Hostellerie de la Mer. It was just a few years after the so-called “68” events. He got it into his head, as he would recall in his posthumous memoirs, to steal an atomic submarine. Through the bathroom transom, one could make out the nearby sodium lights at the Longue Isle base. Did this business seem straightforward to my old master, in his delirium, or had he just decided on a rather complicated way to kill himself? Whatever the case, he had purchased an officer’s uniform in dark blue wool at the Clichy flea market, on which – after referring to the Larousse Encyclopedia of the Twentieth Century – he saw five gold stripes corresponding to the rank of ship’s captain. With the face of a manic-depressive spaniel under his ornamental officer’s cap, he would have been laughable, were it not for the nerve-racking circumstances, as he chain-smoked Gauloises that night, seated on the little bamboo bed beneath the window (he absolutely insisted that I sleep in the double). His plan consisted of simply showing up the next day at the entrance to the base and informing the maritime gendarmerie that he was the new commander of the Redoutable, appointed at a Council of Ministers that same morning (this detail struck him as tremendously cunning, likely to allay any suspicion). I, on the other hand, harbored grave doubts as to the reliability of this scheme, but I had too mush respect for the philosopher who had helped me discover scientific Marxism not to go along with it. I just pointed out to my old master that it was (probably) forbidden to smoke aboard a nuclear submarine. The proletariat is going to change all that, Rolin, he replied from inside a bluish cloud. All the same, I persisted, all the same: he shouldn’t show up at the security checkpoint with a cigarette hanging from his mouth; it just wasn’t very ship captain-like, in my view. We’ll see, we’ll see, was his reply. Then, putting out his Gauloise: all right, let’s get some sleep. And soon that’s what we were doing, rocked by the faint sound of surf, the light clinking of the halyards.

Text handwritten on the back of a “Tourist Map of the Crozon Peninsula”

Olivier Rolin, Hotel Crystal (pp. 31-33, 2004 [2008])

Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier, trans. William Cloonan (pp.29-30, 2007 [2002])

…, in the same way back then several years seemed a vast stretch of time, and so Gideon possessed in our eyes a formidable seniority, as if he had been anointed by History, and also by “The Theory,” as we used to say. Because he had been a favorite student of the philosopher whose name the public only learned the day he strangled his wife, but you had read his books, which seems to restore Marxism to the dignity of a science. Lives are forests filled with shadows and mysteries, Marie, you tell Thirteen’s daughter; enormous things rot, hideous, nightmarish animals caterwaul in the darkness of each life. All the while you were stupidly wandering what was keeping him from joining The Cause, this mentor who was for you the image of rigor was going nuts, imagining he was hijacking a nuclear submarine or stealing gold from the Banque de France, he was trembling on his knees at the feet of the woman he would wind up killing. On the first days when the red flags were invading Paris streets, at the beginning of that long ago month of May, he was crossing the city in an ambulance from a psychiatric clinic. He never believed that could ever happen, the avenues transformed into poppy fields. And him, haggard, fleeing. What good had been “The Theory?” You had no idea how completely men are woven from darkness, scarred by fear; literature would have taught you that, but you had rejected literature, you only believed in “life,” “life,” and “experience,” clarified by the Theory ,and by Gideon’s analyses and instructions ,which were of a terrifying simplicity. You were intransigent and frightfully ignorant – and it would have done you no good to tell you that.

Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier, trans. William Cloonan (pp.29-30, 2007 [2002])