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vacation because they have children. I stay in Paris, I play solitaire on the computer, and around the fifteenth I take a long weekend off; that was the extent of my visits to my father. On that subject, did I have a good relationship with my father? Yes and no. Mostly no, but I came to see him once or twice a year; that in itself wasn't too bad.
    He nodded. I could feel my statement was coming to an end, though I wanted to have said more. I felt overcome by a feeling of irrational, abnormal pity for Chaumont. He was already loading paper into his printer. "My father was very athletic!" I said brusquely. He looked up at me inquiringly. "I don't know . . . ," I said, spreading my hands in despair, "I just wanted to say that he was very athletic." He shrugged disappointedly and pressed Print.
    After I'd signed my statement, I walked Captain Chaumont to the door. I was aware that I had been a disappointing witness, I told him. "All witnesses are disappointing," he said. I pondered this aphorism for a while. Before us stretched the endless monotony of the fields. Chaumont climbed into his Peugeot 305; he would keep me informed of any developments in the investigation. In the public sector, the death of a parent or grandparent entitles one to three days' leave. As a result, I could very easily have taken my time going home, bought some local Camembert, but I immediately took the highway for Paris.
    I spent the last day of my grace period in various travel agencies. I liked holiday brochures, their abstraction, their way of condensing the places of the world into a limited sequence of possible pleasures and fares. I was particularly fond of the star-rating system, which indicated the intensity of the pleasure one was entitled to hope for. I wasn't happy, but I valued happiness and continued to aspire to it. According to the Marshall model, the buyer is a rational individual seeking to maximize his satisfaction while taking price into consideration; Veblen's model, on the other hand, analyzes the effect of peer pressure on the buying process (depending on whether the buyer wishes to be identified with a defined group or to set himself apart from it). Copeland demonstrates that the buying process varies, depending on the category of product/ service (impulse purchase, considered purchase, specialized purchase); but the Baudrillard and Becker model posits that a purchase necessarily implies a series of signals. Overall, I felt myself closer to the Marshall model.
    Back at the office I told Marie-Jeanne that I needed a holiday. Marie-Jeanne is my colleague. Together we work on exhibition proposals; together we work for the benefit of the contemporary arts. She is a woman of thirty five, with lank blonde hair, and her eyes are a very light blue. I know nothing about her personal life. Within the office hierarchy, she has a position slightly senior to mine; but this is something that she ignores, preferring instead to emphasize teamwork within the office. Every time we receive a visit from a really important person—a delegate from the Department of Plastic Arts or someone from the ministry—she insists on this notion of teamwork. "And this is the most important man in the office!" she exclaims, walking into my office. "He's the one who juggles the figures and the financial statements . . . I would be completely lost without him." And then she laughs; the important visitors laugh in turn, or at least smile good-naturedly. I smile too, insofar as I can. I try to imagine myself as a juggler; but in reality it's quite enough to master simple arithmetic. Although strictly speaking Marie-Jeanne does nothing, her work is, in fact, the most complicated job: she has to keep abreast of movements, networks, trends; having assumed a level of cultural responsibility, she constantly runs the risk of being thought reactionary, even obscurantist; it is an accusation from which she must defend herself and the institution. She is also in regular