Plato Was Not Enough

The Ship

2026-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Rue Claude Tillier, XII arrondissement, Paris. A building from the 1970s, put up by an association of former French ambassadors to Africa to welcome migrants into the capital. Three hundred beds at the start. When I arrived, six lustres later, thirteen hundred. Four floors, each with its own rooms and collective kitchens. A Dantean underworld beneath. A courtyard at the centre, the village square.

Two populations, half the building each: Malian immigrants on one side, Algerians on the other. Eighty percent belonged to the first group. If the building had been a ship, it would have capsized.

It was madness by any measure. Every year the prefecture issued a waiver, because it had nowhere to put the migrants and could not afford to close the building. There were others like it across Paris — substantially similar, substantially full. When I left the city, years later, the season of fires began. That had been my greatest fear, ahead of the sanitary one so fashionable today. But I belong to the generation that blew on a sweet dropped on the ground and called it disinfected.

Every electrical socket carried such a multitude of multi-plugs — hotplates, heaters, warmers, kettles — that it became tangible proof that guardian angels exist. The full-time electrician spent his days chasing cables fused into the walls and switches short-circuited by a paste of decomposed cockroaches.

The Algerians, older men, were not in surplus. If they were not harkis — the "fighters for France" in the bloody Algerian war of liberation — they had certainly lived through it. They were old now, the way Europeans are old; or European, the way the old are.

On the other side, the sub-Saharan co-religionists: irrepressible vitality, irreverent, apparently out of control. It was a staggering observatory. Hierarchies and scales of value crossed, opposed, sometimes turned against each other like the gears of a mad clock.

The invisible structure</h3>
There was the imam, the religious hierarchy, and the inevitable call to prayer filling the courtyard and the adjoining streets. I remember Boubou, a likeable layabout who often loitered near my office. One day, mid-sentence, the muezzin sang and Boubou sprinted to the staff lavatory — separate, as is the custom in France, from the bathroom — to perform the required ablutions. Purity expresses itself in many forms.
There were the delegates, the centre's representatives I dealt with as director. They were clan heads, one per family name: the Diallos, the Tourés, the Traorés. And this dynamic could be surprising. Diarra, who led my team of orderlies, commanded respect even though he was not a delegate. Diarra belonged to a higher-ranking family. When a representative of the Malian government came to my office to announce that the executive had bought a satellite channel and decided to install a giant dish on the roof of Tillier, the guarantor — acting as the government's ambassador to the centre — was Diarra, not the delegates.
There were the elders, sometimes in Mali, sometimes at Tillier, who decided who would leave or occupy a bed in my centre. It was a genuine hidden power, and a constant arm-wrestle for the manager — for me — who had to mediate with the demands of the outside world: French authorities, social services, and so on.
Then there was a hierarchy based on order of arrival in France. The African binman employed full-time by the city of Paris stood at the top. The boy just off the boat at the bottom. The latter was the one to fleece, because everything was service, market. You need a residence permit and don't know where the offices are? I'll tell you — for a price. The closed-source model applied to daily life.

The permanent whirlpool</h3>
The centre was a kind of permanent whirlpool, where the concept of property grew very thin. There was a market for freshly stolen mobile phones. The buyer got an unpredictable window for calling relatives back in Africa: the duration depended on how fast the victim got the SIM blocked by their operator.
There was a butcher, a giant with a machete who hacked pieces of lamb on wooden blocks and laid them out for sale on a table — in summer, naturally. Seen in this light, the antiseptic hand gels and the amuchina in the salad that people now use so liberally seem more like superstitious rites of an odd religion. I don't have the numbers, but I doubt the mortality rate in Rue Tillier strayed far from the European average.
I remember, one day, having to scold the giant with the machete. My finger raised, "don't you dare, not ever again" — and he nodded. Sometimes you push your luck.
Communication mattered. The same notice printed on red paper made far more impression than a few sentences on a white sheet. Blood was very present in the collective imagination.
There were the cooks, preparing industrial quantities of mafé, the West African national dish of chicken and spices. On the floor or at the tables, strictly with the right hand — the left serves other purposes — residents and centre staff, RATP transport workers, Aéroports de Paris employees, all of us ate together in this swarm of uniforms and clothing of every kind.
There were, in the underworld below, the tailors sewing endless lengths of fabric that swept the floor. Even when the sewers overflowed. It was fine.
And there were the goldsmiths. Yes, goldsmiths. They worked gold with skill, producing geometric forms that have nothing to do with the often hideous abstraction of the twentieth century. These were methectic forms in the Platonic sense: they captured the idea, the geometric form used by the demiurge in the Timaeus, by Leonardo in his drawings.

The twelve Mamadou Traoré</h3>
Every so often the gendarmes would arrive.
"We need to speak with Mr. Traoré."
"Which one? I have seventy-four."
"Mamadou Traoré."
"In that case, twelve."
"Mamadou Traoré, born in Bandiougoula, 1982."
"Which of the four?"
In many documents of the time, to be fair, only the year of birth appeared — no month, no day. But the point was something else. Here you touched with your hands the fact that individual identity — the idea that each person is unique and unrepeatable — is a Western invention. In the sub-Saharan wing of the Claude Tillier Centre, identity began with the surname. The individual is the torchbearer of the lineage, like the nobility among us.

The method</h3>
Living at the centre meant riding the crest of the wave, with the goal of defusing the permanent fuse — to paraphrase Trotsky — of civil, penal, and sanitary emergencies. It was constant negotiation, mediation, finding the right word. My predecessor had given me good counsel on this: when someone raised their voice — it happened often, with populations inclined to theatricality — he would speak ever more softly, forcing the other to lower theirs. Though this stratagem would not have worked had his interlocutor not recognised a certain power in him, his being the director. Without that, the louder voice would simply have drowned out the quieter phrasing. Dialogue always presupposes recognition of the other.
For my part, I used a different approach, especially in the most heated moments. I remember meetings with furious delegates and howling crowds behind them. I remember their ceremonious way of going back to Adam and Eve to explain the roots of a contingent problem they wanted me to address. There was a great deal of theatricality, and in their own way they were performing — they had to show their people they meant business.
The imperative, then, was not to interrupt. Never, for any reason. It would have been too strong a trigger, and rightly so: cutting someone off is a failure of respect — even if, at times, not from emotion but sheer exhaustion, you are sorely tempted.
Do not interrupt. Make it understood that you are listening, and listen in earnest, while noting the logical steps of the speaker's argument in the margin. How useful my university note-taking habit proved in those moments. You feel like Socrates in the Apology, but you keep writing. If you recognise the right to speak, your own right will be recognised in due time. Then it is your turn, and from your notes you draw a coherent discourse in which nothing is forgotten — you synthesise, connect the dots, and answer everyone, thereby saying: I heard you. You propose solutions, open a dialogue. A game of mutual recognition against a backdrop of concrete problems. The hemlock is not for today.
It was profoundly philosophical work. The dialectic of ideas played out before my eyes, and it was fascinating. That anthropological step aside created a theatre in which the figures of thought could play outside the usual frames that allow debate only when it does not impact the real. The censorship of posts that fail to conform to our social media's Community Standards is no different from that of the Ancien Régime, where — as Tocqueville noted — one could discuss anything provided one did not discuss power. Tillier, like the later experience of the Roma camp, offered precisely this: playing in earnest, not for show. Philosophy became a sextant for navigating real life, not a drawing-room ornament.
On the strength of this, I proposed to several university rectors that philosophy be introduced into the training of social workers. Sociology and psychology can provide extremely useful keys, I explained, but the educator — confronted by trade with thought patterns sometimes unknown to him — can find himself in situations he cannot interpret, and make the wrong choices as a result. From that simple observation came the philosophy courses I taught during the Tillier years at various French training institutes for social workers. As well as the cafés-philo — philosophical discussions in Parisian bars — that I ran with psychologists and third-sector workers, with abundant carafes of wine, as Socrates teaches.

The wrong metaphor</h3>
But the most dangerous thing is not open confrontation, even theatrical as I have described. Disaster lies in wait when the interest and emotion of the other distorts your words. When the reported version is enough — fits the expectations — and makes it normal to judge without hearing the other side.
In 2002 came the terrible sinking of the Senegalese ferry Joola, off the coast of Gambia. The ship, overloaded beyond belief with passengers, had capsized under the excess weight. The images looped on every network and made the danger plastic, visible.
At the time I was fighting every day to reduce the risks of overcrowding. The dangers were enormous — not only sanitary. The centre had just been the epicentre of "the largest tuberculosis epidemic since the war," to quote the doctors who had managed it. But fire was worse. The trafficking was incessant and the delegates profited from it, making it ever harder to talk without colliding with vested interests. We were heading straight for the wall. I was afraid for them — genuinely afraid — and I was afraid for myself. I felt the breath of criminal liability on my neck, whatever might happen in that building where nothing met code — the perfect scapegoat, if anything did.
Exasperated, in a private conversation with the chief delegate, I used the wrong image — that of the Joola — to make him understand where the unchecked growth of numbers was leading us. And with that image I lost the centre.
I touched an exposed nerve. Many residents had acquaintances on that ferry. I touched interests. The phrase was seized upon, twisted, repeated throughout the centre with intentions attributed to it that were the opposite of those that had produced it. It was a wrong phrase, and it failed to respect the grief of others. By its nature, then, it lent itself to a distortion that was anything but disinterested.
Then I lost my grip. It became wall against wall.
We tend to think the most treacherous situations are the theatrical ones — the furious crowds — when in fact a private, unprovable, one-to-one conversation can have far worse consequences. We know how dangerous crowds are. The Gospels tell us, the Apology tells us, the books of Gustave Le Bon and René Girard tell us. But the point is not, in truth, the container — it is the intention, the soul, of the interlocutor, whether singular or multiple.
At Tillier I learned that video meliora sed deteriora sequor is a borderline act: sometimes at the edge of the unconscious, in that grey zone where one knows and does not know. And frankly, I do not know what moved the delegates in their hearts. In the distortion, everything fit, and maybe that suited them.
The sophist, on the other hand, knows fully what he does and what he wants. But that figure I would only encounter later.

The fires</h3>
I returned to Italy for family reasons. In Paris, the season of fires began. Several structures like mine — all from the same period, all with the same problems — caught fire, as was inevitable. Funds were unlocked to renovate them. But the dead did not return, and perhaps neither did the managers.

Written in dialogue with an AI assistant. The life, the memories, and the voice are the author's. Disclosure is the point. </blockquote>

The Knives

2026-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

In 2010, I was appointed to manage a Rom camp in a wealthy northern Italian city — the kind of city whose GDP matches that of a small EU nation. Its ring road was the kind you get when a fellow citizen becomes a minister: no emergency lane, potholes, battered guardrails. In the coils of an access ramp sat the old camp, a piece of land that made developers and volunteers salivate — the first to build on it, the second to feel, and perhaps be, good people.
The Roma had to be moved. A consortium of the Municipality, the Curia, and the Red Cross found the new site and the man to run it: an unknown who had directed a large migrant centre in Paris, on Rue Tillier.
I had returned to Italy and knocked on the municipality's doors looking for work. There was, as it happened, a hot potato — the kind nobody wants because it ruins careers: the Rom camp. I accepted. Partly for the challenge, partly to skip the queue — using risk to reach the upper floors without the slow grind of an outsider. I did not see that I was a fuse.

A round of introductions. A visit to the police headquarters. I found myself in a squad car with the deputy prefect, driving that ring road. The concrete barriers slid past like an eighties music video. It was raining in patches. We reached the camp.
My nomadic baptism. They, poor devils, had to listen to a little speech full of winged images and good sentiments — the kind that surely pleased the Curia delegate present, but might have been better suited to a middle-school essay. I felt as though I were onstage in some provincial Khovanshchina, though Mussorgsky had nothing to do with it, and I had real people in front of me. I would get to know them. It would become deeply interesting.
A few days later the camp was moved to an industrial zone: 130 caravans, mine the largest — whether as a mark of power or capital, I never knew. It served as my office. Suit and tie, always. I dislike the "dress like a pauper so they know I'm on their side" look that social workers often affect. And since I had to meet the authorities almost daily — for them, yes, you do need a costume if you want to be believed — I told myself: if I must for the one, I must for the other. The Roma understood. Paradoxically, the disguise was for the authorities; the dignity was for the Roma. One outfit, two meanings.
The Curia gave me staff: retired teachers, Caritas volunteers. A different parish from the previous team, who came from the world of political activism. We tackled basic needs. We built.

Two clans. One from Craiova, the other — smaller — from Pitești. There were family heads. There were needs. First among them: the residence permit, which was mandatory at the time. I made a pact: you help me carry out a census, and I'll help you get your permits, since I have direct access to the police headquarters. They accepted. Balancing interests is something the Roma understand easily — unlike many of my interlocutors of the time, as would become clear.
The pact: I made a book with a photo and the personal details of every adult, then delivered the census to the municipality and the police. If they stopped you, they'd know you were here and leave you alone. I had informal consent from the authorities, and it worked.
A few months passed. The census advanced. But one inhabitant — whom I had seen in a violent argument with other family heads — kept slipping away. He was the last one left. Finally he gave in, came to my caravan, let himself be photographed — but pulled a face, the kind teenagers make to feel original. I wondered why he was playing the fool.
A week later I delivered the book to the authorities. The investigative unit called: come immediately. The fool was wanted for murder. "We'll pick him up discreetly. Don't worry."

Life went on. The work was a balancing act between neighbourhood committees, media pressure, authorities, volunteers. And the Roma knew how to play, if you put yourself in the game. There is an ironic, joyous quality to their way of being — though the mood can shift in an instant.
My camp paid its bills. I don't know if it was the only one in Italy, but it caused a stir. How did I manage it? I went to them to "beg." Every evening, a round of the caravans, collecting a coin from each. The reasoning was simple: give me one coin at a time, instead of getting the final blow all at once. The reversal of roles amused them, and they understood its usefulness: in media terms, a camp that "pays its bills" defuses a great deal of hostility. These rounds were also my way of knowing people, taking the pulse. Sometimes they offered a beer — more than one per round, by the end — and we drank their way, with a little salt on the bottle neck.
Once a month I took all those coins, often greasy or sticky, to the municipal energy company to pay the bills. With a certain roguish spirit, I savoured the scene of the clerks forced to count the coins, the fruit of my begging and the Roma's.
Sometimes, having no alternative, I brought my two children to work. There were many children there. They played together. One day I called them and they didn't answer. I called here, I called there. Suddenly I saw them emerge, along with three other children, from the industrial waste skip. The kind of thing that gets your parental rights revoked — or qualifies as Italian neorealism, depending on how you look at it.
Another day, a squad car brought two minors back to the camp. They had been caught climbing into the clothing donation containers on the street — the kind with a mechanism that can trap you inside. The kids got out of the car. The officers handed them over to me. The suit and tie demanded a serious talk, but I struggled not to laugh. The police officers too, to be honest.

Many Roma had a category C driving licence. I persuaded the local haulage federation to come and run an assessment test — well publicised, of course. The aim was to defuse the perception of social danger on two fronts: public narrative, and the Roma's actual behaviour. Promote real work and real integration. Reduce the community's most socially unacceptable actions. And prevent the palpable risk — my imaginary fear? — of vigilante reprisals against them.
Over time I learned that the most "annoying" ones, the most visible — the ones begging at traffic lights — are in fact the poorest, the lowest rung in the camp's hierarchy. The more discreet ones may be involved in criminal activities. When the police, ordinary citizens, and the media go after the Roma at the traffic lights, they are targeting the weakest — the ones who may actually need help. The untouchables are colluding, and who knows what connections they might have, and not only with organised crime: white collars need labourers too.
The great day arrived. The local heads of the haulage federation came with two gleaming lorries. They let the Roma try them out. Four or five handled them well. For now, it was a game where everyone had fun — but something was being built for tomorrow, one step at a time.

With the volunteers, we created a school. Italian law requires mandatory schooling, which in practice means placing children in classes by age group: you're six, you go to first grade; eleven, you go to middle school — regardless of your knowledge of the language or your level of education. The idea, agreed with the education authority, was to train the young Roma at the camp for a few months, preparing them to enter school in September, at the start of the new school year. I could count on a number of retired teachers willing to teach at the camp.
So school began. We set up tables, a dozen chairs, notebooks, pencils, markers. We gathered the children. They sat down. Not a second passed before we saw them all together — with the same synchrony as the Australian coral reef when it spawns — each one running off carrying a chair like a trophy. They looked like sunbeams radiating from the little school in every direction. They certainly had the speed of light.
In the following days, though, the school began to work, thanks to a new pact. At the end of the lessons there was a snack — yoghurts and puddings provided by the municipal dairy. It was deeply moving. Education always is.

But the camp had its shadows. Let's say there was a humanity without frills, with an extreme sense of transience and, at the same time, a capacity for compromise. On my daily rounds to collect bill money, I heard stories of Rom families back home who rented helicopters to throw money onto wedding guests. I'm not saying it isn't true.
During those rounds, there was one caravan where I could never get the agreed payment. In the end I had to raise my voice with the family head — the same one I'd struggled to photograph for the census, whom I later learned was wanted for murder. We argued. A couple of days later, the investigative unit picked him up. Naturally, everyone in the camp thought I'd had him arrested because he'd argued with me.
A few weeks passed. One evening, on my round, I reached the killer's caravan and my blood froze: he was there, and no one had warned me — least of all the police. I was alone in the camp. I made a decision that probably saved me: I walked toward him, looking him straight in the eyes. In the end, he lowered his gaze. Danger averted — if there ever was any danger. Maybe it was just a film in my head, Sergio Leone style.

There was a Rom at the camp who worked for a well-known courier company. He slept in his van so it wouldn't be stolen. He had a wife but no children yet, if I remember right. Since he met the requirements — a stable income, a "real" job — I set about finding him a house. After a few months, the accommodation was found. And his wife's arms were broken. Because "if they got a house, they must be police informants." That was how the camp reasoned. Terrible shadows.

Then one morning I found four extra caravans.
I knew this was the beginning of the end. Losing control of the numbers — who is here, how many — means losing control of the structure. I knew it from directing a centre in Paris built for 300 beds, where 1,300 people actually lived. This drift had to be stopped immediately.
Emergency meeting with the authorities. They understood the risk. Meeting with the family heads at the camp. I obtained their authorisation to remove the excess caravans if the occupants didn't take them away within a couple of days. Meeting with the leader of the party whose volunteers had managed the camp before me. He understood and agreed.
The next morning, a police van, a couple of squad cars, the municipal lorry with its mechanical claw. The Roma lined up at the entrance like the figures in Pellizza da Volpedo's Fourth Estate. Accompanied by the deputy prefect, I approached them. With a gesture, they indicated which caravans to remove. The claw lifted two away. The police couldn't believe their eyes. We parted agreeing on a second appointment to remove the other two.

A couple of weeks later, the same routine. Everything proceeded as before. The party leader agreed again. This time, at the camp, there was only one squad car, plus the lorry. But the wind had changed. No welcoming committee this time. The deputy prefect and I went deeper into the camp. Meanwhile, a local radio station raised the alarm: "Accorrete compagni, il dottor Baudo sta smantellando il campo" — "Comrades, come quickly, Mr. Baudo is dismantling the camp."
The Roma surrounded us, knives drawn. We managed to slip away. Operation aborted.
I went back to the party leader, furious. "How could you! You gave me your word — you knew the purpose was to protect the camp!" His reply, words I will remember all my life:
"Sì, ma avevamo bisogno di creare un caso nazionale."
Yes, but we needed to create a national case.

End of the camp. End of the school for the children. End of the collaboration with the authorities. A few days later, the riot police came through to beat people. The camp lasted a few more weeks, in the hands — it was said — of organised crime. Then it was dismantled.
On the access ramp where the old camp once stood, the three towers of the Provincial Administration now rise.

Written in dialogue with an AI assistant. The life, the memories, and the voice are the author's. Disclosure is the point. </blockquote>

The Hood

2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Milano</h2>
Milan, early nineties. My philosophy exams finished, I went to see Professor Scaramuzza. His course had stayed with me — he specialized in the aesthetics of ugliness, mostly of the Hegelian variety. I didn't know him well, but he seemed a decent man. I knew the books better than the professors, and academic dynamics were entirely foreign to me.
I remember his office: formica, metal chairs, concrete. Set among the Renaissance arches of the Università Statale, the Philosophy Department was an artificial limb grafted onto a mutilated body — the building had taken some bombs in the last war.
Few words. I told him I was bilingual in French and proposed we put it to use. He offered me two texts on La Laideur dans l'Art by an unknown Russian émigré, published in 1947. Her name was Lydie Krestovsky.
I saw him again months later, once I had gathered the material.

Passage de la Main d'Or</h2>
I moved to Paris, to the passage de la Main d'Or — a delightfully alchemical name, though it apparently came from a theater long since demolished. I lived in the home of Yvonne Guilloux, who had just become my mother-in-law.
As a child, I later discovered, Yvonne had a friend named Clara Malraux, who was always talking to her about Alix Tardieu. My mother.
Yvonne was a good, generous person. She spoke of her father, Louis Guilloux: how a childhood bone tuberculosis had left his left hand slightly deformed, ruling out the manual trades — he could not become a cobbler; how, back in Brittany, he had taken in the communist volunteers of the Spanish Civil War. She told me that at school, when she spoke Breton, the teachers beat her fingers with a ruler — now that they've eradicated it, they teach it in universities. And she told me of the time, young and beautiful, she had danced with Ignazio Silone at the Venetian receptions that followed the colloquia of the European Society of Culture.
When your father is famous, a young woman is marked forever. Time stops. A cult forms — as I could see in my own home, too.

The Hunt</h2>
I began my research with two dull books from 1947 in hand, and perhaps to avoid reading them too closely, I started walking the streets of Paris. It was my salvation.
I found a civil-status document for the author. At the Bibliothèque Tourgueniev — the Greek I had learned in school allowed me to decipher the Cyrillic catalogue cards — I discovered other publications of hers in Russian, a language I did not know. I hunted for clues like a forensic detective, in the hushed apartment that housed the library, with its scent of wood, the creak of the parquet, the curious and respectful gaze of the librarian, who seemed the sacristan of a story — or of History. Through the old site in the Latin Quarter had passed, in successive waves, White Russians and Red Russians; through it had passed the Nazis, whose columns of tanks my mother had watched as a child, not far away. From the new site, near the Mouffetard district behind the Sorbonne, you could trace the streets of the Mensheviks. A Russian world I had never suspected was opening before me. At home I devoured Dostoevsky. When I wasn't reading, I traced the streets.
I frequented the Bibliothèque Nationale de France — the old site on rue de Richelieu, founded by Cardinal Mazarin and later patronized by the young Lenin. On that street the leader of the Revolution had collided with the French proletariat, represented by a concierge he paid every day to leave his bicycle in the courtyard. One day, returning from the BnF, he found the bike stolen: the parking fee, the concierge explained, did not include guardianship.
It was at the BnF that the breakthrough came. I found another French text by Lydie Ratner Krestovsky: a book dedicated to her husband, the young pupil of Bourdelle who had enlisted pour la France and died at the front in 1914. She loved him deeply — it breathes through every line. But between the lines, another story glimmers. The text read like an apocryphal gospel.
Two drawings by Bourdelle opened the volume.
The first: Vassily lying on his back in the grass, arms along his body, face turned to the sky — a Christ taken down from the cross. "Je pris mon outil des tracés," Bourdelle writes, "j'essayais d'y former une jeune figure calme [...] couchée sur la verdeur de l'herbe, le visage tourné et comme offert, face au vaste et paisible azur."^{1</a>}
The second took my breath away. A Masonic compass dominates the page, its vertex at the top, its arms vertical along the sides. Inside, Vassily is a crucified Christ — but there is no cross. His raised arms touch the compass arms at the exact height where the nails would have been driven. His head is reclined to the right, eyes closed. Behind him, a female figure gazes upward toward the compass hinge. Beneath the hinge, an angel with outspread wings holds the whole structure up with a raised right arm. The woman's hands support Vassily's from below; his palms face the sky. From his palms, like inverted stigmata, rise flames.
"Que ces pages toutes fragiles soient notre mur, Krestovsky, un mur plus frémissant," Bourdelle writes. "Que mes petits cartons de fresque par le mortier divin du souvenir, nous gardent les parfums spiritualisés des tons, d'où s'ouvrira lentement dans les âges la fleur éternisée du cœur."2</a>
I had found something to sink my teeth into.

The Web</h2>
A thought was taking shape. Its contours sharpened with every encounter, every walk. By day I crisscrossed the capital with my most precious guide, the Guide des Russes en France by Raymond de Ponfilly — more a compass than a guidebook, in which streets were organized by anecdotes, presences, and improbable encounters of every stripe. Topography mapped the relationships between ideas — relationships otherwise invisible.
By night I delivered couscous. Allô Couscous — that was the name — made use of students with cars to deliver meals across the city. With a street atlas in one hand — the TomTom did not yet exist — and the steering wheel in the other, I traced the boulevards des Maréchaux, named for Napoleon's marshals: Davout, Ney, men who had marched on Moscow. I delivered to the concierges of the various avenues Lénine in the banlieue, to a rich cocaine addict in a bathrobe with a bombshell at his side and a panoramic view of the Arc de Triomphe, to the Caserne des Célestins on the boulevard Henri IV, where cavalrymen in parade uniform greeted you by opening champagne with a saber, to tiny Marais apartments reached by climbing stairs at the top of which an agoraphobic arm would emerge from a door, extend the money, and take the goods.
I followed leads, and each one opened a world. I would discover a name, race to the historic Russian bookshop on rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and acquire every French translation available: Shestov, Berdiaev, Merezhkovsky, Rozanov... An old habit of mine, one that lengthened my studies considerably: back in Milan, when a university course covered thirty pages of a philosopher and three hundred of the professor's parasitic commentary, I read the philosopher's entire work.
Every encounter was real and ideal. Walking the streets was at once thinking and traversing history — including my own, including my family's. I read Berdiaev, and my grandfather told me, laughing, that he remembered a strange tic of his: every so often he would let out the roar of a lion. I read Dostoevsky's Demons and found Boris de Schloezer, its translator, at Pontigny alongside Lydie — the only three Russians ever admitted to the place where my grandfather, then a young poet, had made his debut under the wing of Roger Martin du Gard, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The same Décades de Pontigny were attended by the same André Gide who in 1936 traveled to the USSR — together with Louis Guilloux. On his return, Gide published his Retour de l'U.R.S.S., exposing Stalin's cult of personality and the regime's control of information. Aragon demanded that Guilloux write a public denunciation of Gide in Ce Soir. Guilloux refused. The newspaper fired him. The Breton lost his salary, left Paris, and returned to his Brittany to take in the volunteers of the Spanish Civil War.

Saint-Serge</h2>
I began to frequent the Institut Saint-Serge, another historic site of the Russian community. A small church tucked against the almost hilly park of the Buttes-Chaumont in the eighteenth arrondissement. You opened a gate, followed a little country path — in the middle of the city — and came upon a wooden church, filled with carpets and icons. Beside it, the institute of Russian Orthodox theology, with its priests and its books.
I came from the Platonic school, which had formed me in my youth. From the Academy of Athens to Saint-Serge, from Plato to Sergei Bulgakov, the institute's founder — the passage was as natural as from Greek to Cyrillic. A former Protestant chapel built for a German brickyard, the building had been seized by the French authorities at the outbreak of the First World War and given to their Russian allies, becoming the oldest center of Orthodox theology in Western Europe.
I began to visit the honorary dean, Father Boris Bobrinskoy. First within the institute's walls, then at his home nearby. He received me with his pale blue eyes — transparent, patient. We spoke of Lydie, then of Plato, then, as time passed, of matters increasingly personal. Père Boris celebrated the Orthodox liturgy in French, in the crypt of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on rue Daru. I went to attend.
In the half-light, a priest lay stretched out on the carpets among the parishioners. The fabrics muffled the joyful sound of children running about during Mass. The pure, simple singing told of Byzantium. The golden iconostasis re-vealed.

The Hood Opens</h2>
Life and study mirrored each other, questioning the very meaning of knowledge. And life answered — again and again — in a register far removed from the Stalinist purges: in the form of warmth, tenderness, simplicity. The Orthodox faith warms; the Western faith illuminates. Entering the crypt, every word yielded to a heartbeat.
I instinctively recoiled from the aesthetics of genius, from the cult of the superman — feeling as mine, and profoundly right, the conception of art that Plato sets out in the Ion: artistic inspiration, the Muse, is like a magnet to which the artist clings — the first ring in a chain that transmits the divine magnetism through him to all who receive the work.
This was the aesthetic I recognized in Jean Tardieu, who was first and foremost the playful, shy, kindly grandfather: already a public figure, he had once come to my primary school class — and later confessed to me that in front of my little classmates he had le trac, a beginner's stage fright.
And if anything unites the Platonic conception and Tardieu's work, it is Mes outils posés sur une table, the poem I love above all others:3</a>

Mes outils d'artisan / sont vieux comme le monde / vous les connaissez / Je les prends devant vous : / verbes adverbes participes / pronoms substantifs adjectifs. / Ils ont su ils savent toujours / peser sur les choses / sur les volontés / éloigner ou rapprocher / réunir séparer / fondre ce qui est pour qu'en transparence / dans cette épaisseur / soient espérés ou redoutés / ce qui n'est pas, ce qui n'est pas encore, / ce qui est tout, ce qui n'est rien. / ce qui n'est plus. / Je les pose sur la table / Ils parlent tout seuls je m'en vais. </blockquote>
From Lydie I learned that the receiver — that hideous term from aesthetics textbooks, meaning the person who reads a book or looks at a painting — is not a mere spectator. Like the metal ring in the Ion, he is traversed by a higher force, and in enjoying the work he retraces within himself the artist's labor, the path from inspiration to the finished piece. The artist in service of the Muse is like one who opens a via ferrata in the mountains. The reader, the viewer, is the one who climbs it after him. Both in service, both ascending.
From père Boris I learned that the meaning of gnôthi seauton, nosce te ipsum, has only one sense: if you know yourself, you can pass on to something else. With that single phrase he opened the hood: pass on to something else... beyond the self. To open to the world, or to verticality, or both at once — because the wonder of creation draws you upward. Everything I had loved, everything I had known, fell into harmony, took on meaning. To the Greek phrase carved on Apollo's temple at Delphi came the answer from The Idiot: now is the moment to face the world.
I asked père Bobrinskoy if he would baptize me. The ceremony took place in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral — where Turgenev's funeral had been held. The library had led me to the cathedral.
Two years later, in Italy, my children were baptized by Father Zelensky, a former pupil of Bobrinskoy. I watched the water, the anointing, the three circles of renunciation of the devil. Two little scraps of five and six dipped into a basin that the small electric water heater had failed to warm, then straight into bathrobes. It was winter. The parish women, moved by pity, rushed to help and slipped gloves onto their bare feet. If it is true, as Rozanov says, that we can offer the Almighty our gaze upon the world — through my eyes, the Good Lord had smiled.
Two lustres later, the name of Alexander Nevsky came to me again. A book from my publishing house, brought out with great difficulty — a study of Dostoevsky's unpublished drawings by the Saint Petersburg scholar Konstantin Barsht — received the Alexander Nevsky Prize, special section Naslednie, Heritage.
Once the hood is open, life speaks in synchronicities.

^{1
"I took up my tracing tool; without being able to see the page very clearly, I tried to form upon it a calm young face, that of Krestovsky, lying on the green of the grass, his face turned and as though offered up to the vast and peaceful azure."
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^{2
"May these fragile pages be our wall, Krestovsky, a wall more quivering. May my little fresco boards, through the divine mortar of memory, preserve for us the spiritualized perfumes of tones, from which will slowly open, across the ages, the eternalized flower of the heart."
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^{3
My tools of craft / are old as the world / you know them / I take them up before you: / verbs adverbs participles / pronouns nouns adjectives. / They knew, they still know how / to weigh upon things / upon wills / to draw apart or bring together / to join to separate / to melt what is so that in transparency / within this thickness / may be hoped for or feared / what is not, what is not yet, / what is everything, what is nothing. / what is no more. / I lay them on the table / They speak by themselves I leave.
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Written in dialogue with an AI assistant. The life, the memories, and the voice are the author's. Disclosure is the point.
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