Look at writers like Proust. They knew how to use minor characters to humiliate, to belittle their protagonists. In a novel, there is nothing more valuable than teaching the lesson of humility to the heroes. Remember, in War and Peace, the little peasant girls who cross the road, laughing, in front of Prince Andrei’s carriage? He speaks to them, directly, and the reader’s imagination is at once lifted; now there is not just one face, not just one soul. He portrays the many faces of the crowd. Wait, I’ll read you that passage, it’s remarkable. Put the light on,” he said, for night had fallen.

“Planes,” Florence replied, looking up at the sky.

“Won’t they leave me the hell alone?” he thundered.

He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy. It was like a shrill, brutal trumpet shattering the fragile crystal walls he’d taken such pains to build in order to shut out the rest of the world.

“God!” he sighed. “How upsetting, what a nightmare!”

Brought back down to earth, he asked to see the newspapers. She gave them to him without a word. They came in from the terrace and he leafed through the papers, a dark look on his face. “All in all,” he said, “nothing new.”

He didn’t want to see anything new. He dismissed reality with the bored, startled gesture of a sleeping man awakened abruptly in the middle of a dream. He even shaded his eyes with his hand as if to block out a dazzling light.

Florence walked towards the radio. He stopped her. “No, no, leave it alone.”

“But Gabriel . . .”

He went white with anger. “Listen to me! I don’t want to hear anything. Tomorrow, tomorrow will be soon enough. If I hear any bad news now (and it can only be bad with these c**** in government) my momentum will be lost, my inspiration blocked. Look, you’d better call Mademoiselle Sudre. I think I’ll dictate a few pages!” She hurried to summon the secretary.

As she was coming back to the drawing room, the telephone rang.