If, by its grandiose and maniacal, in fact demented, character, this project won him the respect of his teachers, it did not enable him in any way to join any of the groups that formed around him on the basis of a common aesthetic ambition or, more prosaically, an attempt at collectively entering the art market. However, he made a few friendships, although not very deep ones, without realizing at what point they would prove ephemeral. He also had a few love affairs, none of which lasted long. The day after he graduated, he understood that he was now going to be quite alone. His six years of work had produced more than eleven thousand photos. Stored in TIFF format, with a lowest-resolution JPEG, they were easily held on a Western Digital 640GB hard disk, which weighed a little under seven ounces. He carefully put away his large-format camera and his lenses (he had at his disposal a Rodenstock Apo-Sironar of 105mm, which opened to 5.6, and a Fujinon of 180mm, which also opened to 5.6), then considered the remainder of his possessions. There were his laptop, his iPod, a few clothes, a few books: not a lot, in fact; it would easily fit into two suitcases. The weather was fine in Paris. He hadn’t been unhappy in this bedroom, or very happy, either. His lease ran out in a week’s time. Hesitating to leave, he made one last walk around the area, on the banks of the lake by L’Arsenal, then called his father for help in moving out.
Their cohabitation in the house in Raincy, for the first time in a very long time, for the first time really since Jed’s childhood, apart from some school holidays, immediately turned out to be both easy and empty. His father still worked a lot and was far from letting go of his business; it was rare for him to come home before nine, even ten; he collapsed in front of the television while Jed heated up one of the prepared meals he’d bought a few weeks before, filling the trunk of the Mercedes, from the Carrefour in Aulnay-sous-Bois. Trying to vary things, and maintain a nutritional balance, he also bought cheese and fruit. Anyway, his father paid little attention to food; he listlessly switched channels, generally settling on one of those tedious economic debates on LCI. He went to bed almost immediately after their dinner; in the morning, he had left even before Jed got up. The days were bright and uniformly hot. Jed would stroll between the trees in the park and sit down beneath a tall lime tree, holding a book of philosophy, which he generally didn’t open. Some childhood memories came back, but very few; then he would return home to watch the coverage of the Tour de France. He loved those boring long shots, taken by helicopter, that followed the peloton as it advanced lazily through the French countryside.
Anne, Jed’s mother, was from a lower-middle-class Jewish family—her father the local jeweler. At twenty-five she married Jean-Pierre Martin, then a young architect. It was a marriage of love, and a few years later she gave birth to a son they named Jed in homage to her uncle, whom she had loved. Then, a few days before her son’s seventh birthday, she committed suicide—Jed only learned about this many years later, through the indiscretion of his paternal grandmother. Anne was forty, her husband forty-seven.
Jed had almost no memory of his mother, and her suicide was hardly a subject he could broach during this sojourn in the house in Raincy. He knew that he had to wait for his father to talk about it himself—all the while knowing that this would doubtless never happen, that he would avoid it to the very end.
One point, however, had to be clarified, and it was his father who dealt with it one Sunday afternoon, after they’d just watched a short stage—the Bordeaux time trial—that hadn’t marked any decisive change in the general classement. They were in the library, by far the most beautiful room in the house, with an oak-paneled floor, left in a half-light by stained-glass windows, with English leather furniture; the surrounding bookshelves contained almost six thousand volumes, mainly scientific treatises published in the nineteenth century. Jean-Pierre Martin had bought the house at a very good price, forty years before, from an owner who urgently needed liquidity. This was a safe and elegant residential area at the time, and he imagined a happy family life; in any case, the house would have enabled him to have a large family and frequently receive friends—but none of that had ultimately happened.
At the moment when the broadcast returned to the smiling and predictable face of host Michel Drucker, he switched off the sound and turned to his son. “Do you plan to pursue an artistic career?” he asked; Jed replied in the affirmative. “And for the moment, you can’t earn a living?” He nuanced his reply. To his own surprise he had, in the course of the previous year, been contacted by two photography agencies. The first specialized in the photography of objects, had clients for catalogues that included CAMIF and La Redoute, and sometimes sold its pictures to advertising agencies. The second specialized in culinary work for magazines like Notre Temps and Femme Actuelle that regularly called on its services. Unprestigious, neither field offered much money: taking a photograph of a mountain bike, or a soft-cheese tartiflette, earned much less than a snapshot of Kate Moss, or even George Clooney; but the demand was constant, sustained, and could guarantee a decent income. Therefore Jed was not, if he could be bothered, absolutely without means of support; what’s more, he felt it desirable to maintain a certain style of pure photography. He contented himself with delivering large-format negatives, precisely defined and exposed, that the agencies scanned and modified as they saw fit; he preferred not to get involved with the retouching of images, presumably subject to different commercial or advertising imperatives, and simply delivered pictures that were technically perfect but entirely neutral.
“I’m happy you’re autonomous,” his father replied. “I’ve known several guys in my life who wanted to become artists, and were supported by their parents; not one of them managed to break through. It’s curious, you might think that the need to express yourself, to leave a trace in the world, is a powerful force, yet in general that’s not enough. What works best, what pushes people most violently to surpass themselves, is still the pure and simple need for money.
“I’m going to help you to buy a flat in Paris, all the same,” he went on. “You’re going to need to see people, make contacts. What’s more, you could say it’s an investment: the market is rather depressed at the moment.”
The television screen now featured a comedian whom Jed almost managed to identify. Then there was a close-up of Michel Drucker laughing blissfully. Jed suddenly thought that his father maybe just wanted to be alone; true contact between them had never been re-established.
Two weeks later, Jed bought the flat he still occupied, on the boulevard de l’Hôpital, in the north of the thirteenth arrondissement. That most of the neighboring streets were named after painters—Rubens, Watteau, Veronese, Philippe de Champaigne—could be considered a good omen. More prosaically, he was not far from the new galleries that were opening around the Très Grande Bibliothèque quarter. He hadn’t really negotiated, but had gathered enough information to know that everywhere in France prices were collapsing, especially in the urban areas. Properties remained empty, never finding a buyer.
2
Jed’s memory held almost no image of his mother, but of course he had seen photos. She was a pretty woman with pale skin and long black hair, and in certain pictures you could even say she was beautiful; she looked a bit like the portrait of Agathe von Astighwelt in the museum of Dijon. She rarely smiled in these pictures, and even her smile seemed to hide an anxiety. No doubt this impression was influenced by the fact of her suicide; but even when trying to cut yourself off from that there was something in her that was a bit unreal, or in any case timeless; you could easily imagine her in a painting from the Middle Ages or the early Renaissance; on the other hand, it seemed implausible that she could have passed her teens in the 1960s, that she had ever owned a transistor radio or gone to rock concerts.
During the first few years following her death, Jean-Pierre had tried to follow his son’s schoolwork, and had scheduled activities for the weekend at McDonald’s or the museum. Then, almost inevitably, the demands of his business had eclipsed them; his first con
tract in the domain of all-inclusive seaside resorts had been a stunning success. Not only had the deadlines and initial estimates been met—which was in itself relatively rare—but the construction also had been unanimously praised for its balance and respect for the environment. He had received ecstatic articles in the regional press as well as in the national architectural reviews, and even a full page in the Styles section of Libération. At Port-Ambarès, it was written, he had managed to capture “the essence of the Mediterranean habitat.” In his view he had only lined up cubes of variable size, in uniform matte white, directly copied from traditional Moroccan buildings, then separated them with beds of oleanders. All the same, after this initial success, the orders had flooded in, and more and more often he was required to go abroad. When Jed reached the first year of secondary school, he decided to send him to board.
He opted for the college at Rumilly, in the Oise, run by Jesuits. It was a private institution, but not one of those reserved solely for the elite: the fees remained reasonable, the teaching was not bilingual, and the sports facilities were nothing extravagant. The parents were not ultra-rich but rather conservative people from the old bourgeoisie (many were diplomats or in the military), though not fundamentalist Catholics; most of the time, the child had been put in boarding school after a divorce turned ugly.
Although austere and unattractive, the buildings were reasonably comfortable; two to a room in the first years, the pupils had a private room once they reached fourth year. The strength of the establishment, the major plus in its portfolio, was the pedagogical support it offered each of its pupils. The rate of success at the baccalaureate had, since the establishment’s creation, always stayed above ninety-five percent.
It was within these walls, and under the extremely dark canopies of pine trees in the park during long walks, that Jed spent his studious and sad teenage years. He didn’t complain about his lot, and couldn’t imagine any other. The fights between pupils were sometimes violent, the humiliations brutal and cruel, and Jed, being delicate and slight, would have been incapable of defending himself; but word spread that he was motherless, and such suffering, which none of them could claim to know, intimidated his schoolmates; thus there was around him a sort of halo of fearful respect. He didn’t have a single close friend, and didn’t seek the friendship of others. Instead, he spent afternoons in the library, and at the age of eighteen, having passed the baccalaureate, he had an extensive knowledge, unusual among the young people of his generation, of the literary heritage of mankind. He had read Plato, Aeschylus, and Sophocles; he had read Racine, Molière, and Hugo; he knew Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, the German romantics and the Russian novelists. Even more surprisingly, he was familiar with the main dogmas of the Catholic faith, whose mark on Western culture had been so profound—while his contemporaries generally knew more about the life of Spider-Man than that of Jesus.
This sense of a slightly old-fashioned seriousness was going to make a favorable impression on the teachers who had to examine his application for admission to the Beaux-Arts; they were obviously dealing with a candidate who was original, cultivated, serious, and probably hard-working. The application itself, entitled “Three Hundred Photos of Hardware,” displayed a surprising aesthetic maturity. Avoiding emphasis on the shininess of the metals and the menacing nature of the forms, Jed had used a neutral lighting, with few contrasts, and photographed articles of hardware against a background of mid-gray velvet. Nuts, bolts, and adjusting knobs appeared like so many jewels, gleaming discreetly.
He had, however, great trouble (and this difficulty would stay with him all his life) in writing the introduction to his photos. After various attempts at justifying his subject he took refuge in the purely factual, restricting himself to emphasizing that the most rudimentary pieces of hardware, made of steel, already had a machine precision within one-tenth of a millimeter. Closer to precision engineering in the strictest sense, the pieces used in quality photographic cameras, or Formula 1 engines, were generally made of aluminum or a light alloy and machined to within a hundredth of a millimeter. Finally, high-precision engineering, for example in watchmaking or dental surgery, made use of titanium; the tolerance was then within microns. In short, as Jed concluded in an abrupt and approximate way, the history of mankind could in large part be linked to the history of the use of metals—the still recent age of polymers and plastics not having had the time, in his view, to produce any real mental transformation.
Some art historians, more versed in the manipulation of language, noted later that this first real creation of Jed’s already presented itself, just as in a way did all his subsequent creations, despite their variety, as a homage to human labor.
Thus, Jed launched himself into an artistic career whose sole project was to give an objective description of the world—a goal whose illusory nature he rarely sensed. Despite his classical background, he was in no way—contrary to what has often been written since—filled with a religious respect for the old masters; to Rembrandt and Velázquez he much preferred, from that time onwards, Mondrian and Klee.
During the first months following his move to the thirteenth arrondissement he did almost nothing, except fulfilling the numerous orders he received for photographs of objects. And then one day, while unwrapping a Western Digital multimedia hard disk that had just been delivered by courier, and which he had to shoot from different angles by the following day, he understood that he had finished with the photography of objects—at least on the artistic level. As if the fact that he had come to photograph these objects in a purely professional and commercial aim invalidated any possibility of using them in a creative project.
This realization, as brutal as it was unexpected, plunged him into a period of low-intensity depression, during which his main daily distraction became watching Questions for a Champion, a program hosted by Julien Lepers. By dint of his sheer determination and a terrifying capacity for work, this initially ungifted host—he was a bit stupid, with the face and the appetites of a ram, and had first imagined a career as a variety singer, for which he no doubt nursed a secret nostalgia—had gradually become a central figure in the French media landscape. People saw themselves in him: students in their first year at the École Polytechnique as well as retired primary-school teachers in the Pas-de-Calais, bikers from Limousin as well as restaurant owners in the Var. Neither impressive nor distant, he exuded an average, and even sympathetic, image of France in the 2010s. A fan of Jean-Pierre Foucault’s, of his humanity and sly straightforwardness, Jed nevertheless had to admit that increasingly he was seduced by Julien Lepers.
At the beginning of October he received a phone call from his father, informing him that his grandmother had just died; Jean-Pierre’s voice was slow, a bit downcast, but scarcely more than usual. Jed’s grandmother had, he knew, never got over the death of her husband, whom she had loved passionately, which was surprising in a poor, rural milieu that normally didn’t lend itself to romantic outpourings. After his death nothing, not even her grandson, had managed to rescue her from a spiraling sadness that gradually made her give up all activity, from breeding rabbits to making jam, and finally abandon even the garden.
Jed’s father had to go to the Creuse the following day for the funeral, then for the house and inheritance issues. He wanted his son to accompany him. In fact, he would like him to stay a little longer to take care of all the formalities; he had a lot of work at the firm. Jed accepted immediately.
The following day, his father fetched him in his Mercedes. Around eleven they got onto the A20, one of the most beautiful motorways in France, one of those that cross the most harmonious rural landscapes; the air was clear and mild, with a little mist on the horizon. At three, they stopped at a service station just before La Souterraine; at his father’s request, while he filled the tank, Jed bought a Michelin Departments road map of the Creuse and the Haute-Vienne. It was then, unfolding the map, while standing by the cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, that he had his second great aest
hetic revelation. This map was sublime. Overcome, he began to tremble in front of the food display. Never had he contemplated an object as magnificent, as rich in emotion and meaning, as this 1/150,000-scale Michelin map of the Creuse and the Haute-Vienne. The essence of modernity, of scientific and technical apprehension of the world, was here combined with the essence of animal life. The drawing was complex and beautiful, absolutely clear, using only a small palette of colors. But in each of the hamlets and villages, represented according to their importance, you felt the thrill, the appeal, of human lives, of dozens and hundreds of souls—some destined for damnation, others for eternal life.
His grandmother’s body was already resting in an oak coffin. She wore a dark dress, her eyes closed and her hands joined; the employees of the funeral parlor were simply waiting for Jed and his father to close the lid. They left them alone, for about ten minutes, in the bedroom. “It’s better for her,” his father said after some silence. Yes, probably, thought Jed. “She believed in God, you know,” his father added timidly.
The following day, during the funeral mass, which the whole village attended, and then again in front of the church, as they received condolences, Jed told himself that he and his father were remarkably adapted to this sort of circumstance. Pale and weary, both dressed in somber suits, they had no difficulty in expressing the required seriousness and resigned sadness; they even appreciated, without being able to believe in it, the note of discreet hope struck by the priest—a priest who himself was old, an old hand at funerals, which had to be, given the average age of the population, far and away his main activity.
After returning to the house, where they were served the vin d’honneur, Jed realized that this was the first time that he had attended a serious funeral, à l’ancienne, a funeral which didn’t attempt to dodge the reality of death. Several times in Paris, he had attended cremations. The last one was of a fellow student at the Beaux-Arts who had been killed in a plane crash during his holidays in Lombok; he had been shocked that some of those present hadn’t bothered to switch off their cell phones before the moment of the cremation.