Ambassador Carbougniat, as Vichyssois as Brisson, as much a Doriotist as Robert…you should have seen his tantrums…His Excellency!…don’t sent me to Vincennes!…boy, did he shake his Embassy bed, sixty-nine fits in a row, chewing whole mouthfuls of his gobelins…it was really alarming!…looked like he was going to eat the whole Embassy…the furniture and the files…everything…They had to promise him as “super-class” job in the other hemisphere…he was getting sicker than me…having me there so near to him, in the Vesterfangsel…suffering agonies…because they didn’t impale me…he claimed I’d insulted Montgomery…and the Führer…and Prince Bernadette…you should have seen the letters he wrote to the Baltavian ministers…regular ultimatums! I’ve seen copies…
Lying here now in my fever, I tremble as much as he did…I wet the bedclothes…oh, but I’m not goofy enough to forget what I was…the prize package…the gilt-edged quarry of the chase…Glory! Bravery! Supreme Flunkeydom! even here like this, worn to a frazzle, a tottering wreck, I still get the same effects…Line up on the line…no deviations…The living proof is that they throw me out of everywhere…invariably…like forty-five chancres…everywhere…everything…the one and only genuine shithead: Ferdinand!
And I’ve seen them all at work…with their asses…all smeared with vaseline…licking everybody’s balls…I know their names and addresses…same as the addresses of the moving-men and would-be assassins! I’m still here, only one foot in the grave…and I know their ages…their birthdays, every last one of them…I say them over to myself…their birthdates…I see their big moments of happiness…kick! trample!…in a vision!…they’ll be a thousand times worse…a thousand times luckier next time…they’ve said as much…they’ve taken their positions…some positions! I see them…I see them…over 102º you see everything…fever must be good for something!…I never forget a thing!…never!…It’s my nature…
—Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Castle to Castle, 1957, trans. Ralph Manheim
