Jean-dominique Bauby by Diving Bell, the Butterfly Read Free Book Online Page B

have a photo to show them.
    We stop at the top of a big stairway that goes down to the beach bar and to a long line of pastel-colored cabanas. The stairs remind me of the entrance to the Porte d’Auteuil metro station in Paris. I used to climb them as a child when returning from the old Molitor swimming pool, my eyes red with chlorine. The pool was demolished a few years ago. As for stairs, they are now just dead ends for me.
    “Want to turn back?” asks Brice. I protest, shaking my head vigorously. No question of turning around until we have reached our real goal. We move quickly past an old-fashioned wooden carousel, whose shrieking calliope pierces my eardrums. We pass a well-known hospital character we call “Fangio.” Tall, dark-haired, athletic-looking, Fangio is rigid as a poker. Unable to sit, he is permanently condemned to either a vertical or a horizontal position. He gets about at amazing speed, lying flat on his stomach on a vehicle he operates himself, parting the crowds with yells of “Look out—here comes Fangio!” I know who he is, but who is he really? I have no idea. Finally we reach the farthest point of our journey, the very end of the promenade. I have not insisted on coming all this way just to gaze at the flawless seascape. I have come to gorge on the aromas emanating from a modest shack by the path leading away from the beach. Claude and Brice bring me to a halt downwind. My nostrils quiver with pleasure as they inhale a robust odor—intoxicating to me but one that most mortals cannot abide. “Ooh!” says a disgusted voice behind me. “What a stench!”
    But I never tire of the smell of french fries.

Twenty to One
    That’s it—it’s come back to me. The horse’s name was Mithra-Grandchamp.
    Vincent must be on his way through Abbeville by now. If you are driving from Paris, this is the point where the trip begins to seem long. You have left the unencumbered thruway for a two-lane road choked by endless lines of cars and trucks.
    When this story takes place, more than ten years ago, Vincent, myself, and a few others had had the extraordinary good fortune to be putting out a daily newspaper, which has since disappeared. The owner, a press-infatuated industrialist, was brave enough to entrust his baby to the youngest editorial team in Paris, at the very moment when dark political and financial forces were plotting to snatch its controls. Without knowing it, we were the last cards he was to lay on the table, and we hurled ourselves one thousand percent into the fray.
    By now Vincent has reached the intersection where he leaves the Rouen and Crotoy roads on his left and takes the minor road leading through a string of small townships to Berck. Drivers who don’t know the way are led astray by its twists and turns. But Vincent, who has come to see me several times, keeps his bearings. To his sense of direction he adds—carried to the extreme—a sense of loyalty.
    We worked seven days a week. Arriving early, leaving late. We worked on weekends and sometimes all night, blissfully doing the work of a dozen with five pairs of hands. Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous. It was part of my job to force him to choose among them, which went against his impatient grain. He would have preferred to act at once on every one of them, good and bad.
    I can hear him now, fuming at the steering wheel and cursing the Highway Department. In two years the thruway will reach Berck, but right now it is just an endless construction site, pushing forward slowly from behind a screen of bulldozers and heavy-duty vehicles.
    We were inseparable. We lived, ate, drank, slept, and dreamed only of and for the paper. Whose idea was that afternoon at the racetrack? It was a fine winter Sunday, blue, cold, and dry, and the horses were running at Vincennes. Neither of us was a racing fan, but the track correspondent valued us highly enough to treat us to lunch at the Vincennes