The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain Read Free Book Online Page B

to finish her story; she had poured two and a half years of her life into it. If she could land the Prix Balbec, it would be the best possible consolation prize for an unhappy love affair.
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    An hour and a quarter later, Fanny was beginning to doubt anything interesting ever happened in parks. Her feet had taken her far beyond Batignolles to the gates of Parc Monceau on Boulevard de Courcelles. She had gone in, passing the usual park wildlife of children and old people. As she stood on the main path looking at the row of benches, it occurred to her to place the hat on one of them. The fourth one along was empty; she put it down there and retreated to watch discreetly from the bench opposite. No one had seen her do it; now all she had to do was wait.
    But since then, nobody had stopped or even turned to look at the solitary black hat. She wasn’t so sure now about her poetic gesture; after all the hat belonged to her, it even had her initials inside it, and what did it matter really if the ending of her story was true or not?
    Just as she was getting up to retrieve it, a bearded man in jeans and a sheepskin jacket stopped beside the bench. Heseemed to hesitate for a moment before sitting down. He was wearing round, black-rimmed glasses and must have been about sixty. He turned to look at the hat, observing it as though it was a silent, mysterious creature. He reached for it and turned it over. Then, bizarrely, he held it up to his nose and seemed to sniff it. He smiled and glanced at his watch, then he stood up, turned back to face the hat, paused, and snatched it up again. Fanny watched him leave. He held the headwear in his hand, without putting it on. He disappeared out of the entrance to the park.
    Fanny took out her fountain pen and wrote: ‘The man with the grey beard took the hat away. Who was he? I will never know.’ She suddenly felt incredibly tired. Perhaps it was only just sinking in that she had really left Édouard. After a brief dizzy spell she could not bring herself to record in her story, Fanny stood up and went the same way as the man who had taken the hat.
    She passed through the wrought-iron gates and stopped on the pavement. ‘He is very powerful,’ the gypsy had said, crossing herself. ‘You know him, everyone they know him.’ Fanny could not take her eyes off the cover of
Le Nouvel Observateur,
which had been blown up and plastered all over the newspaper kiosk. The picture showed François Mitterrand with a red scarf around his neck, a dark coat and a black felt hat on his head. He was staring into the camera with a mischievous glint in his eye, and Fanny had the distinct impression the President was looking straight at her.

 
    Sicilian lemon, bergamot, green mandarin, tangerine, cypress, basil, juniper berry, cumin, sandalwood, white musk, ylang-ylang, patchouli, amber and vanilla. Pierre Aslan identified the scent as Eau d’Hadrien, created by Annick Goutal in 1981. But there was also another perfume on the hat, a more recent addition: bergamot, pink jasmine, sweet myrrh, vanilla, iris and tonka bean. Pierre could have recited the ingredients of the second scent forwards or backwards. It was that mythical perfume Solstice. His perfume. Invented by him, Pierre Aslan, the nose.
    He could not have said why he had picked up the hat. He had long since given up trying to find reasons for his bizarre behaviour, which had previously been a source of such confusion. He sniffed the hat again: there were definitely two perfumes, Eau d’Hadrien, for men, and Solstice, for women. The felt of the hat was impregnated with Eau d’Hadrien; Solstice was only just beginning to take its place.
    Pierre Aslan, who hadn’t created anything for eight years now, was not in Parc Monceau by chance. For the last five years he had been seeing a psychoanalyst, Dr Fremenberg, and had formed the habit of walking in the park for quarter of an hour or so each week before his