Rachel- eng version

Taylor Swift, chimpanzees, and a WhatsApp group.

It was a rainy Sunday morning in Paris.

“So, Rachel, how’s your second novel coming along?” asked Lottie, as she raised a cup of coffee to her lips.

Silence settled over the dining room of the Haussmann-style flat. With her four hosts’ eyes fixed on her, Rachel set down the second pastry she had barely dared to take from the basket. She should never have come. With a shy, almost apologetic gesture, she picked up a linen napkin and brought it to her lips to brush away whatever crumbs might have lingered there. She ran her tongue over her gums and, after a few futile attempts, gave up trying to dislodge the piece of croissant stuck between her teeth. Rachel took a deep breath and replied:

“Yes… it’s going well. Thank you for asking,” she added timidly.

“That’s good…” murmured Lottie, lowering her gaze to her plate. “Can you tell us more, or not yet?”

Lottie let her question linger in the air, and the only sound was the delicate chime of the faïence. With the tip of her cutlery, she made a small circular motion toward the group.

“Are you finally talking about us?” asked Lottie, pouting like a six-year-old.

A mean, muffled laugh rippled through the table. The four friends smiled graciously, without showing their teeth, just enough not to crease their Botox injections.

Rachel’s presence at this brunch had been, at least in principle, well-intentioned. Recently single, she had reconnected with her childhood friends. She had met Lottie and her entourage back in middle school, in Rouen. Lottie lived in a townhouse in the chic neighbourhoods. Rachel came from the northern districts of the city. As a child, she had lived with her parents in social housing. Now they had “moved up” and lived in a housing estate near the Rouen ring road. In eighth grade, the two girls had befriended each other the way two friendless teenagers do, not out of affinity, but survival.

Something else had drawn them together. Lottie’s parents owned horses, and Rachel dreamed of riding. The very idea was so unthinkable, given her parents’ modest income, that Lottie had never dared ask permission even to visit a riding centre. Not to ride, just to see the horses.

One weekend, Rachel had been invited to the Château des Dames, the family’s second home. The place was grandiose. Rachel had never stepped foot anywhere like it. She had sincerely believed that the castles she glimpsed from the motorway during holidays were museums. It had never occurred to her that anyone, real, living people, might actually inhabit them. The estate stretched over several hectares. And in her bedroom, tucked somewhere in one of the château’s wings (east wing, west wing, Rachel got lost three times trying to find the bathroom), Lottie showed her some of the books from her “library”. What struck Rachel most was that they all belonged to “my mother” or “a family friend, you wouldn’t know him.” Lottie had simply gathered books from the various libraries scattered around the château to build her own.

Trying to fill the silence at dinner, Rachel brought up the books in front of Lottie’s mother. The woman’s replies were vague, delivered without lifting her impeccably blow-dried head from her phone. When she did answer, Rachel couldn’t understand half the words she used. A glass of Sancerre in hand, the grande bourgeoise brushed aside the topic, declaring that Maupassant, a “local colour” author, was ultimately just a disturbed man who ended up in an asylum, and that there was no point studying him in eighth grade anyway. Teachers, she said, were “not what they used to be,” and “In my day…”. The evening had ended in a sour haze, with Rachel convinced she had offended her hostess, who, in truth, had never even learned her name.

The two girls spent the rest of the weekend at the château’s stables, and Rachel returned home, where books simply did not exist. They avoided buying any, just as they avoided buying almost anything, because there was “no space.” At Rachel’s house, the carving knife might be found in “Martine’s” room, and one went “to the hairdresser”, a major expedition. Life in a housing estate: oppressive as ever. Rachel had been ashamed of her “prole” origins, as a classmate would later say. It took her a long time to understand what that truly meant.

“Finally talking about you…” Rachel repeated aloud. It sounded like the title of a song by Hélène Ségara, her mother’s favourite singer. She glanced around. The flat Lottie’s parents had bought her was perfect. Marble fireplace, ceiling mouldings, sparkling white walls, like something straight out of Instagram. The dining room, especially, was magnificent. Who, in 2025, had a dining room in the middle of Paris? Rachel’s flat in Belleville consisted of a single room of barely thirteen square metres. It was barely legal.

At Lottie’s, portraits lined the walls of the large brunch room. The first time Rachel visited, she thought she recognised Lottie’s mother in one of them. When she asked, Lottie replied that no, it was a flea-market find from an early-morning stumble home after a party on a bar-boat near Bercy. “The frame was pretty,” she had said.

Too much time had passed. Rachel had to answer. Without losing her composure, she cleared her throat and prepared her reply. Wedged into their leggings, their Pilates Reformer class started at eleven, her four friends hung on her every word, champagne flutes poised near their lips.

After taking a deep breath, Rachel sidestepped the question:

“Yes. I can say that each of you inspires one or two characters in my story.”

A polite, murmured “Oh” drifted around the table. Their surprise sounded utterly false.

And of course, what Rachel had said was false. There was no second novel. She hadn’t written a single line. There was nothing. Not a word. Only a blank Word document titled “Book II”.

A few years earlier, desperate to escape the suffocating Paris air in mid-July, Rachel had visited Colette’s childhood home in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. While her ex, Gaston, made Ligue 1 bets on BetClic, the two of them joined a guided tour meant to reveal “the impact of the house on Colette’s work”. A long-limbed guide led the group slowly from room to room. It was composed entirely, Rachel was sure of it, of French teachers nearing retirement. White flakes on black dresses, stale breath, tortoiseshell glasses: all wielding their “Pass Éducation” for a discount. At the ticket desk, Rachel overheard a woman mutter, as she put her wallet away: “One of the only reasons I’m still in this damned job…”

Upstairs, squeezed into a chestnut-wood office, the guide explained:

“This is where the Captain, Colette’s father, would retreat and write his novel. Of course, no one was allowed to read it. When he died, Colette and her mother discovered that he had written nothing at all, that the cupboards in this very room…”

“Please silence your phone, sir,” the guide cut in sharply to Gaston. Rachel nearly died of embarrassment.

“Sorry…” he muttered gravely.

The guide continued:

“Colette and her mother discovered that the cupboards were filled with blank sheets of paper. In her autobiography, which I’m sure you’ve all read, Colette fondly recounts how she and her mother struggled to get rid of them. Thousands of pages. They made jam-jar labels, Christmas cards…”

The rest of the visit had been mind-numbingly dull. Still, Rachel had learned something: Colette’s father, father of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, had lied his entire life about a novel that did not exist. He had left behind nothing. A void.

This vision of emptiness had shaken Rachel. The idea of lying for an entire lifetime fascinated her. She became convinced that lies were the origin of storytelling. The foundation of fiction.

That day, after dropping Gaston at the bus stop, she began writing her first novel. She worked relentlessly. One version. Then another. Submissions. Rejections. Total rewrites. More rejections. Occasionally, a phone call. Once, she spoke to a “secretary” whom she suspected was a ninth grader on work placement. The girl had asked:

“And your social media presence? Do you have followers? A vlog? People buy books if they know the author.”

Rachel did not vlog.

After a year of rejections and hundreds of submissions, an independent press, Le Devoir, accepted her novel. The editor asked to rework a few passages; the process was calm, even helpful. Rachel eventually held the mock-up in her hands, astonished. A few articles followed. A long profile on France Inter. Respectable sales. The editor was now waiting for a second novel “as soon as possible”. She assumed Rachel would find it easier this time, that she would “free herself from her demons”. Rachel had no idea what demons she meant.

That morning, as she dressed for Lottie’s brunch, she had thought of those supposed demons.

After brunch, walking home along Rue Wilhem, Rachel decided it was time, truly, to write. She admitted it: her friends’ comments had hurt her. She needed to get away from them. Her second novel had to succeed. She simply had to begin.

She sat in the only chair of her tiny flat and opened a blank document. Nothing came. To distract herself, she picked up her phone and drifted through social media. Prince William was riding an electric scooter in Windsor. An American singer was releasing a new album, The Life of a Showgirl. As she was about to place her phone face-down, a video of Jane Goodall appeared. Because she lingered on it for more than two seconds, the algorithm offered another, Jane Goodall in the jungle, kissing a chimpanzee. So many videos could only mean one thing: Jane Goodall had died. A quick search confirmed it.

“Shit,” whispered Rachel.

She didn’t know exactly why, but Jane Goodall had always inspired her. Perhaps because of the long braid, like Pocahontas. Pocahontas retired. Pocahontas filing paperwork at the national health office. Rachel laughed at her own joke, then looked again at her still-empty “Book II”.

And then she had an idea.

A Wikipedia search taught her that before studying chimpanzees, Jane Goodall had always lived among animals. Rachel dug deeper, into the dreaded second page of Google, where she found a school library website that had scanned a few pages from My Life with the Chimpanzees. She learned about Jane’s childhood at Les Bouleaux, the family home where her mother had sheltered unmarried women during the war. For her tenth birthday, Jane’s uncle had given her the gift she had always dreamed of: a tree. At the end of every school day, little Jane hated being shut indoors, she climbed it, “watching the birds and listening to their songs.”

After high school, her mother sent her to Germany so she wouldn’t “think all Germans were Nazis”. The remark made Rachel smile as she scrolled, her chin resting in her palm. Jane’s first job in a clinic caring for children injured in the bombings. Her growing obsession with Africa. Her first flat in Nairobi filling with wounded animals. The monkeys who would mark her life: White Beard, Fanny, Fifi…

The story moved Rachel deeply. She promised herself she would buy the book. She was about to order a copy second-hand when a noise in the courtyard startled her. The neighbour taking out the bins. Her flat was so small the sound echoed and rattled the dishes. Nothing like Lottie’s morning palace. Shame washed over her again. She thought of the books in Lottie’s bedroom at the château, books she hadn’t needed to buy. Rachel looked at her own meagre shelf. The few books were hers. Chosen by her. Read by her. She felt a sudden pride, in where she came from, and in who she was.

Courage filled her chest. She turned back to her document.

She knew what she had to do. She would write about the heroines of her time. After exploring lies in her first novel, she would explore truth. The idea thrilled her. She could already see Augustin Trapenard’s large blue eyes fixed on her on the set of La Grande Librairie:
“After exploring the contours of falsehood, you redefine the limits of truth in this new opus. Tell us, Rachel, what is truth for you?”

Perfect.

Jane Goodall’s life was fascinating. And what a coincidence, her death the same weekend The Life of a Show Girl was released. A few Google Images later, Rachel found a photograph of Jane Goodall at sixteen, in her father’s arms, wearing a dress of swan feathers. Next to Taylor Swift’s 1950s pin-up costumes, one could almost be mistaken. What if Jane Goodall were the original showgirl?

Rachel reread the sentence. Deleted it. Ridiculous. Jane Goodall had nothing to do with any of it.

Still, she was happy. She had finally found a subject. After so many months of uncertainty, she was writing, truly writing, something new, something alive. The face of the guide at Colette’s house floated back to her. The captain’s fate would not be hers.

Around six, her phone buzzed. A notification from the WhatsApp group:
“👯🥳 BFF ROUEN 💕☔️”

Rachel unlocked her phone. The dreary banality of the conversation left her speechless. Photos of a “very stylish” new restaurant in the 11th. Even in messages, the group from Rouen was demoralising.

After staring at her screen for a long moment, Rachel did what future anthropologists would surely interpret as a declaration of war: with a dismissive flick, she sent a single word, “Seen.”
Then said nothing more, and returned to her writing.

*

Traduction: Joseph Sims.