Over time, the characters have become aware of their plight of being characters in a novel, or at least that is what they have come to suspect. As such, they have come to believe that if they are to continue their existence, they had better make sure that they are interesting enough so that the author must continue writing about them. Two new lovers, Léanne and Gilles, have thought that telling interesting stories might be interesting to the author. Léanne told her story (Cendrillon) as recorded here in this blog on July 5, 2025. Now here is the story that Gilles, inspired by Léanne’s story, has come up with. (This is the English translation, of course.)
“It’s my turn, then,” said Gilles.
“Yes. Are you inspired?” said Léanne.
“Yes, maybe. Inspired, or intimidated. Challenged, provoked. Inspired - I prefer that.”
“You are a philosopher, so you have to write. But not just professionally, you have to write your own personal thoughts. All philosophers write, it’s what they do. But we, as characters in the novel, we have to be more personally intimate than traditional professionals. It’s hard to be a character in a novel. We’re not paid enough for what we do!”
She gave a little restrained laugh.
“I ought to deal with obsessional love.”
“I’m not surprised,” she said.
“No?” he replied.
“Right. That’s what I love about you, you’re so fascinating.”
“Not so fast! We need to wait for the result.”
“I’m confident.”
So Gilles related the following story.
Madeleine
Madeleine’s family was quite rich, but the five children were poor in spirit, because their mother, who lacked emotional strength, was not capable of taking care of them. So none of the children knew whether or not they were loved.
Madeleine, the second child and the oldest girl of the flock, always tried to please her mother, but the only way that her mother could express pleasure was by doing nothing, and not complaining. Being an introvert, Madeleine often retreated to her bedroom where she watched television or read her books. She really loved novels, and so in due course she became a very good student of literature. Being of a romantic nature, her favorite book was Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and we can say that this book remained her favorite to the end of her life. For Madeleine, books were always very powerful.
When she was in high school, Madeleine started to feel the desires of the body - that is to say, sexual desires — like all adolescents. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, described how extreme her desire was at the age of 14, to have a man in bed with her. Only sleep gave her relief. That must be the case with most teenagers, and probably of anyone at any age, one might say. In our society there is a great imbalance between the great sexual desire of teenagers and the ability to quench that thirst, and Madeleine was simply another victim of this imbalance. But fortunately, she was weak in mathematics, and so her parents hired a student at the university to tutor her in math after school. Soon she found a way to slake her sexual thirst with this young man.
After her high school years, she moved to a city in the north of her state for college. She didn’t know if her high school tutor was her Heathcliff of her favorite book, but soon she met many other young men, and she said goodbye to the tutor and hello to several of them. She would have been happy to continue her quest for her ideal husband for years, probably, but she couldn’t stop hearing the voice of her mother in her ears. Since she was a mother with old-fashioned ideas, she insisted that Madeleine find a husband as soon as possible. She thought that that was her main responsibility as a mother, to make sure that her daughters marry. Since Madeleine wanted to please her mother, she married her current boyfriend, a nice young man whom she liked well enough.
Since she had studied literature at college, when she graduated she found a position in a publishing house as assistant editor. The three or four older men who had worked there for ten or 20 years were very nice to her, and they all wanted to have sex with her, as she later recounted. Why not? She was thin, svelte, pretty, and she was 22. She liked that, but nothing really happened, there was just flirting.
Her husband was an engineer with no great enthusiasm about being an employed worker, but they had friends and a good life and soon they had two children, a girl and a boy. She loved them very much, and nothing was more important to her than being a good and nice mother. In other words, not being a mother like her own mother. But since she no longer had a job and stayed home with her two kids, and since she had little opportunity to use her intelligence, she became bored at home. She had a woman friend with whom she started to drink wine every Friday. That was a danger sign. She continued to read books.
Then there was a playgroup. The younger of Madeleine’s children, a son, had a friend who had a father. He could just as well as been called Heathcliff, as far as Madeleine was concerned. In short order they began a relationship and neither one could think about anything else. Without thinking about consequences, she needed him. It was a veritable obsession with her, obsessive love. When she called her mother and told her that she was getting a divorce, her mother replied, “I have a new refrigerator!”
Was it really love in the years that followed? Without doubt, they became the most important people to each other in their lives. They fought, but the most important thing in a marriage is that each one sees the other as the most important person in the world.
They had a baby, a little boy full of character, just like his parents. Madeleine became a lawyer, but she left that profession to work in a small bookshop, which she loved very much, being among books and people who loved books. She drank more. Four of the five children in her family had alcoholism, and she couldn’t avoid it. Maybe it was for that reason, or maybe not, that her husband had an affair. They went to couples therapy. Finally, one day she was sitting on the couch and she turned to her husband and said, if I continue like this, I’m going to die. She enrolled in a residential 30 day program, and she became one of the minority of patient who became definitively sober. After that, she was sober for all the twenty years of life that remained to her.
The couple traveled together a lot. He had a hip replacement and surgery for a pituitary adenoma, and she supported him during these illness, and she never drank. Maybe 12 years into her sobriety, she started to forget things. One year later she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Her husband turned to her and said that, from that moment on, they were going to do what she loved best, which was to take cruises and travel. And that was exactly what they did, up to the time when she had to stay in bed because of the progression of her disease.
She could hardly speak, but her husband sometimes wondered if she considered from time to time if she had succeeded in following the plot of her favorite book, Wuthering Heights. One day, when she could hardly talk, she leaned forward in her bed toward her husband, who had hardly left her side in months, and with great effort she whispered, “Thank you, I couldn’t have done all this without you.” Then, the next day, she leaned forward agains and said, “I love you.”
Finally, she had gotten the answer to her question, Is there someone who really loves me? And she had discovered that she would never be abandoned.
When Gilles had finished the story, Léanne turned toward him and said, “What a story, Gilles! It has the real sense of reality! Imagination, fear, a plot (our author’s stories don’t have plots!), and an end that is optimistic but tragic. Do you think that the author will like and admire this story?”
“Well, I hope so!” he said. “Who knows? But I hope so.”
And with that, the chapter came to its end. But now, as he read the chapter, the author’s French teacher was moved to write an addendum!
He wrote: In turning the last page of the chapter that she had just read, Léanne exclaimed, “Look at that! Is it you who wrote this addition? The message written in the book said, “My friends, are you sure of being in the process of attracting the author? Wouldn’t he be conveying, through you, his most intimate secrets? And, is this a banal story, the product of chance? Why now?” Signed: Your faithful reader.
