1. At the feet of Hans Egede
Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, is a small jumble of orange prefab buildings and low grey apartment blocks nestled on a stony outcrop on the edge of the ocean. There are no trees, but there’s a hill topped by the statue of Hans Egede, the Danish-Norwegian missionary who evangelised the world’s biggest island in the 18th century and which, as such, is threatened with removal by Inuit anti-colonialists. It was at his feet that I awaited the helicopters bringing back the Greenlandic prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron – referred to throughout this trip as “PR”, short for président de la république – from their excursion on the ice.
I was hoping I could also get on one of those helicopters, and I thought I had it in the bag when, as the delegation was being split between the chosen ones who would accompany PR in the air and the rest, Macron shot me one of those telling winks he often gives, so unexpectedly, to those who come into his field of view. I quickly returned to my senses: there are many seats on a plane, very few in a helicopter, and this was a PR+3 event, meaning PR plus three other people, which was out of my reach. As an embedded writer travelling with the French delegation to the G7 – the summit of the richest and, in theory, most democratic countries, which is being held this year in Canada – I started having a chance at about PR+6 or 7, which wasn’t too bad.
While waiting for the head of state to return, the mid-level members of the French delegation found a hangar equipped with wifi to work in. They work all the time and, as a diplomatic adviser told me, don’t get jet lag because they hardly ever sleep. As for parasites like me, and the photographers who’ve got nothing to do while PR’s away, we kicked around Nuuk, perspiring in our down jackets and moon boots because we’d been told it would be below freezing while it was actually a balmy 10C (86F) out.
Only a few months ago, Macron would never have got it into his head to visit Greenland. In fact, no one really cared much about Greenland until Donald Trump let it be known that, like Canada, it was destined to become American. There’s a “good possibility”, he said, that Greenland could be annexed “without military force”, adding: “I don’t take anything off the table.” In this context, it was what political communicators call a “strong gesture” on Macron’s part to stop in Nuuk for a few hours on his way to the G7 and address the 200-300 people who’d turned out to listen to him, his voice alternately stirring and cajoling, his words peppered with skilfully placed pauses the Greenlanders have not yet had time to grow tired of.
Hating Macron is a national sport in France – one that I personally do not participate in. Here, on the other hand, people were crazy about him. Ten days earlier they didn’t necessarily know who he was, but on the day of his visit, Nuuk looked every bit like a hotbed of fervent Macronists. His presence brought solace, and the crowd’s enthusiasm reached its peak when, after a resounding “Qujanaq!” (“thank you” in Greenlandic), he declared first that Greenland is neither up for sale, nor up for grabs (prolonged cheers, as if he’d said “Ich bin ein Grönländer”), then that as a sign of unwavering solidarity France will open a consulate in Nuuk (somewhat less enthusiastic cheers), and finally that his helicopter trip with the two prime ministers had allowed him to observe up close the effects of global heating – to which Greenland, whose entire population lives on the narrow coastal strip of a gigantic glacier that is melting at an alarming rate, is particularly exposed.
In the succession of brief speeches, the three leaders outdid one another in their use of the word “climate” – five times for Macron – but I didn’t yet have a feel for just how provocative such seemingly banal statements could be. When the speeches were done, a journalist asked PR how far his solidarity would extend if Trump invaded Greenland, and he answered with a hint of impatience that he didn’t want to waste his time speculating on questions that were not currently on the table.
2. On the plane
Almost seven years earlier, in September 2017, I’d travelled on the presidential plane with Macron, I was profiling for the Guardian. It was at the start of his first term in office, and everything seemed to be going well for him. We were heading to Saint Martin, an overseas territory in the Caribbean that had recently been ravaged by a hurricane, and then to Athens, where Macron gave a pivotal speech on European civilisation. In hindsight, those times seem almost carefree, when you consider that our journey to the G7 was taking place against the backdrop of war in Ukraine, the systematic destruction of Gaza, a now irreversible ecological disaster and, for the previous two days, Israeli strikes on Iran which some considered a prelude to World War III. All this made me wonder if, in another seven years, we’ll look back with nostalgia on our current calamities, so wanton and unstoppable does the chaos seem to have become.
In my notes from 2017 I found these words by Macron: “If we weren’t at a tragic moment in our history, I would never have been elected. I’m not made to lead in calm weather. My predecessor [the jovial socialist François Hollande] was, but I’m made for storms.” On the plane, I showed it to him. “Well, here we are,” he said with a smile.
On the domestic front it must be said that Macron did nothing to calm the storm when he decided a year ago to dissolve the National Assembly – a political electroshock that he no doubt saw as a kill or cure approach to his unpopularity, unprecedented in the history of the Fifth Republic, but which left the country if not totally ungovernable, then at least even more difficult to govern than usual, and in any case more difficult for him to govern. But PR being PR – meaning little inclined to self-criticism – he remains convinced that history will prove him right. At most, as he admitted in his last New Year’s address, his decision had not been understood and he bore some of the responsibility for this misunderstanding, without saying who bore the rest.
Whatever his difficulties on the home front, however, foreign policy traditionally remains the preserve of the French president, and one could reasonably argue that although he’s toast at home, Macron thrives on the international stage. “Good career move,” Gore Vidal is said to have remarked on hearing that Truman Capote had died. In the same way, the global mayhem is proving to be an exceptional career boost for Macron – given that there’s a position to be filled at the head of Europe. In any case that’s how he sees it, and in fact, during the time I spent with him, he did seem to be in fine form. I had imagined that my second portrait of him would be very different from the first, the fall of the Roman empire after its heyday, especially as some had told me that he was now gloomy, tormented, abandoned by all, his nails bitten to the quick, wandering through the corridors of a presidential palace where decisions are no longer taken.
For my part, I saw nothing so Shakespearean. He seemed relatively unchanged, apart from the fact that he’s clearly taken to pumping iron and that, in a tight-fitting black T-shirt – his outfit on the plane – he displayed some quite impressive biceps, which he wasn’t content just to display but kneaded with visible satisfaction. Otherwise he’s still cool, quick on the uptake, available, his blue eyes fixed on yours, his hand clasping yours and only letting go reluctantly, and while I’m ready to believe that deep down (I’m always surprised to hear him use this teenage expression, “deep down”) he’s arrogant, self-centred and not interested in anyone, on the surface at least (which, in my opinion, does not mean that it’s fake), he’s still as attentive as ever, still as much there for the person he’s talking to, still singling them out from the crowd.
That’s a politician’s trait, I know: making you feel that you’re the only one who counts, that if he got on the plane it was to enjoy your company to the full, and that he knows you better than you know yourself. But he takes it to extremes, and everyone who’s had any dealings with him can tell one anecdote or another that illustrates it in an almost supernatural way. Here’s mine. The presidential plane is divided into four sections. At the front is PR’s suite, to which he alone has access. Next is a lounge where, at his bidding, a dozen people can sit at a large oval table for a work session, a drink or even a light meal. (Macron himself seems to eat nothing but pecans.) Next comes a business cabin for the inner circle, PR+18, and finally the rear of the plane, for security, logistics and journalists. I was in the PR+18 cabin and on the three-day trip I was invited to the oval table three times, where I found PR in the mood to talk about French films from yesteryear. Not the Nouvelle Vague, not Godard or Truffaut, no, but comedies and crime films by popular, heritage film-makers such as Henri Verneuil, Georges Lautner and Claude Lelouch that are rebroadcast time and again on TV. (English readers are unlikely to know them, but their unexportable British equivalents might be Nuts in May or Carry On Up the Jungle.) Macron, in any case, reeled off the dialogue, peppered with outdated slang, as ably as he cites the verses of the noblest figures of 20th-century French poetry, such as Yves Bonnefoy, Patrice de la Tour du Pin and Louis Aragon.
There came a moment in this flow of cinematic and literary erudition when talk came around to the upcoming adaptation of The Wizard of the Kremlin, Giuliano da Empoli’s novel about Putin’s eminence grise Vladislav Surkov, for which I wrote the screenplay with film-maker Olivier Assayas. Jude Law plays Putin, and I took out my phone to show PR a photo of him in the role. “Not bad,” Macron said, handing me back my phone, and for a moment I got the feeling he was annoyed that Jude Law is portraying Putin and not him. But why, he asked, did I write the screenplay? Why not Giuliano? (He said “Giuliano”.) I replied that the author of a book isn’t necessarily the best person to adapt it for the cinema, he lacks distance, I myself don’t collaborate on adaptations of my books. Macron raised an eyebrow: “But you adapted Class Trip with Claude Miller, didn’t you?”
Now what you have to know is that Class Trip, based on my novel of the same name, came out almost 30 years ago. I think it’s a beautiful film but it wasn’t a success, critically or commercially. If you did a survey of 10 of my friends maybe one or two would have seen it, and aside from my agent who drew up the contract, none would be able to say whether or not I collaborated on the screenplay. “No surprise there,” people say when I tell them this anecdote about PR, “he’s given notes on everyone he talks to, that’s all.” No. Or if that’s the explanation, it’s even more remarkable than the fact itself. Assuming Macron took the time to review a file on me, it would have to be 15 pages long to include a detail like that.
Amazed, I asked: “How on earth do you know that?”
He replied: “I sleep little but well. That leaves me time to watch films.”
3. The sherpa
A loan word from Himalayan mountaineering where it refers to the guides, the term has become established in international summit meetings: the sherpa prepares the terrain and accompanies the head of state. Since 2019, Emmanuel Bonne has been Macron’s sherpa and head of the Elysée’s diplomatic unit, making him a less public but far more important figure than the various foreign ministers who’ve succeeded one another from one government to the next (that’s my opinion, he’d never say so himself, of course). A career diplomat and Middle East expert, Bonne is an elegant man in his 50s with a clear, deep voice who, maintaining the direct and friendly style used around PR, says he applies the Jesuit watchword perinde ac cadaver (“corpse-like obedience”) in his dealings with him. (At least that’s what he said to me, perhaps because he assumes that as a writer I’m familiar with Latin and Ignatius of Loyola. With others he’s more blunt and says he’s a diehard public servant.)
During the second part of the trip, between Nuuk and Calgary at the foot of the Canadian Rockies, I asked Bonne to explain what was at stake at the summit, and this is what I jotted down. When President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing initiated the G7 – then the “Group of Six”, or G6 – in 1975, the countries that took part (the US, France, UK, Germany, Italy and Japan) accounted for about 75% of global GDP. Today that figure has dropped to roughly 35%. “We were the chairman of the board,” Bonne sums up. “Now, we’re not even majority shareholders.” That makes it all the more crucial for these countries, if they’re not to disappear completely from the scene, to find a solution or at least agree on a position concerning one or other of the major issues facing the planet: Ukraine, the Middle East, the environment, tariffs – it doesn’t matter which, there’s no shortage of elephants in the room. The aim of the summit, then, was to produce a joint declaration that simply expresses a political will, a direction, shared objectives.
Normally this shouldn’t be too difficult, but it’s become so since Trump 2, particularly when it comes to the climate. Until now, saying that global heating is a major threat and that halting it is an absolute priority was as uncontroversial as saying that you’re against war, for peace, for reducing inequality, etc. Once that was said, you did or didn’t act on your words, but it cost nothing to proclaim them. Those days are over. As the master of the world thinks that the climate isn’t a problem, there’s no putting it on the agenda, even as a pious wish. Even the word “climate” has become taboo.
Aware that there was little room for manoeuvre, the Canadians, who were hosting this year’s G7, decided from the outset that there would be no joint declaration and only a kind of neutral summary, with every word weighed on a scale and, as far as possible, emptied of meaning. Already faced with the cruel obligation of hosting as a guest of honour someone who has made no bones about wanting to make their country the 51st state, the Canadians were further traumatised by memories of the previous G7 summit held on their soil seven years earlier, which could not have gone worse. Trump 1 got angry and stormed out before the end, refusing to sign the joint declaration and accusing his host, Justin Trudeau, of being “weak” and “dishonest”. Terrified at the thought of something like that happening again, the Canadians were ready to kowtow. What’s more, in general it’s become an aim in itself for the six members of the club of former masters of the world to keep the damage to a minimum with the seventh. At the same time they must remind everyone they’re still here and, all the while kowtowing, they puff out their chests as best they can. Now I understand better why Macron hammered home the word “climate” with such insistence back in Nuuk.
The exercise, Bonne recapped over a snack at the oval table (radishes, little salmon and cucumber sandwiches, all the pecans you can eat), is “to make ourselves heard without giving the impression that we’re mocking Trump”. Macron nonchalantly responded to this cautious plea for boldness with a scoop: “I called him yesterday morning and told him we were going to Greenland.”
“And?”
“And he said: ‘Great! Very good idea. Tell them I only want what’s good for them.’”
Although English makes no distinction between the informal tu and the formal vous, Macron, in his dealings with Trump – or rather in his accounts of his dealings with Trump – has opted for informal language. He puts all his social skills into setting himself up as the leader of Europe in the age of Trump 2, and as someone who knows Trump well and can make shrewd and unexpected observations about his character (“He’s not touchy in the least,” he said, “and as long as you’re open to give-and-take, he’s anything but egotistical”) – in short, as someone who knows how to handle the beast. This is not untrue, and what’s more, even though Macron is still young (47), in terms of presidential longevity he’s the most senior of the leaders set to attend the G7. He belongs to the very exclusive club of those now in their second term. Bonne recalled that in one of his more expansive moments, Trump himself tapped Macron on the shoulder and said: “You’ll see, you and me, we’ll do a third.”
The French constitution, like the Russian one, prohibits three consecutive presidential mandates, but you can seek a third provided you’ve taken a pass for one term: that’s what Putin did when he handed over the reins to a closely watched Dmitry Medvedev for four years, and Macron is increasingly open about his intention to do the same and run for office again in 2032. This is not provided for in the US constitution, on the other hand, but Trump has already warned that that’s no reason to deprive the world of his brilliance, that a constitution is not set in stone and that patriotic lawyers are already looking for a solution.
4. The Rat
When I woke up in my room at the Lodges at Canmore near Kananaskis, a tiny Alberta village popular with hikers, it was 4am. Macron was already out jogging, but I, not having done my training at the Elysée’s diplomatic unit, was wiped from jet lag. It was in this state of disorientation that I remembered the following.
When his stepdaughters were little, science fiction author Philip K Dick invented a variation of Monopoly for them, aimed at making the endless buying of buildings in the game they loved a little less boring. In this variation the banker is called the Rat, and instead of merely acting as sort of referee, he has the discretionary power to change the rules of the game whenever he wants, however he pleases, without anyone being able to question his dictates. It’s a perpetual clean slate, pure dictatorship, the negation of law and order. For a game to be successful, it’s in the players’ best interests to choose the most vicious and inventive participant as the Rat. A Rat worthy of the name must know how to mete out the torment he inflicts on the players, let them believe that his arbitrary decisions follow a plan, balance cruel disappointments and fickle encouragements, tear them away from everything they’re used to in Monopoly and – without losing their interest – plunge them into chaos.
When, at 8am, after passing through several checkpoints on a mountain road set against a magnificent landscape, we, PR+6 and more members of the delegation, arrived at the huge, isolated hotel – which brought to mind the Overlook Hotel in The Shining – where the summit itself was taking place, I realised that I had come all this way to witness a spectacular game of the Rat.
Dressed in dark suits and ties for the men (an overwhelming majority), and sober trouser suits for the women, 1,500 of us paced back and forth from one lounge to another, through corridors lined with carpets also straight out of the Overlook Hotel. A photographer I’d palled up with made a joke: “Imagine the doors of the elevator open and you see two Trumps come out – twins.” We did a lot of milling around and a lot of waiting, the game for the small fry like me being to bypass the various security guards and go through doors that were, in theory, closed to the likes of us. This is how, by literally clinging to Emmanuel Bonne, I gained access to the large salon (PR+4) where the six normal leaders were waiting for the seventh to descend from his Olympus.
In fact, only five of the six were there: Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, was also missing. They couldn’t start without him, let alone without Trump, so they chatted, the usual pleasantries turning into increasingly disjointed small talk. Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, had the anxious look on his face of a host who repeats a little too insistently that everything is fine, perfectly fine. Shigeru Ishiba, the Japanese prime minister, listened idly as Italian PM Giorgia Meloni told him about her daughter’s passion for manga. I wondered if, one-on-one with the Australian or Spanish prime ministers, she’d have gone on about her daughter’s passion for surfing or bullfighting. Who’s to say. I know that Meloni is considered to be on the far right and that one shouldn’t say nice things about her, but let’s just say that this petite blond woman stood out at the G7 for her vivacious brusqueness and her dress code that made no concessions to the ubiquitous grey. Amid the austere suits, her lightweight sky-blue attire looked almost like beach wear.
As the minutes passed, more and more slowly it seemed, people started wondering where Merz could be. Had he panicked? Fled? The delay had already lasted a good half-hour – a long time for an event scheduled to last no more than 36 hours in all. Finally, the two appeared, Merz tall, slim and grey, with body language that did little to clarify whether he was in the role of hostage or chosen one, Trump true to his image – midnight blue suit, red tie, orange face, thick-set body, only the wisp of a smile. Two leaders talking one-on-one before the official opening of the summit is totally against protocol, Bonne whispered in my ear, an open and deliberate affront, certainly not in the style of poor Merz, an old-school Christian Democrat, the frail and wobbly bulwark against a German far-right already endorsed by the US vice-president, JD Vance. Trump had used Merz to send the usual message: I do what I want.
As to what happened next, I’ll spare you the pleasantries, the welcome speeches and the photocall. Soon the first plenary discussion began, which only the sherpas (PR+1) were allowed to attend, but I had access to the press room where you can see and hear everything as if you were sitting at the table. Kicking things off, Trump said that all this talk was meaningless in the absence of Putin – excluded from the club by that incompetent Obama after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 – a message he repeated in an increasingly grim tone every time anyone dared to send a comment his way.
Taking his cue from Carney, Macron acted as if things were off to a great start and valiantly argued for a trade and tariff agreement that would be beneficial for all parties. Coming to his aid, Meloni suddenly pulled two world maps from her bag and showed them to Trump, saying: “Look, Donald: all of this, in blue, is us 20 years ago, when we were still in charge. And this in red is trade today, ie mainly China. So it would be better if we, the blues, could reach an agreement between us against the reds, because the question now is no longer so much who we let in, but how not to get kicked out.” Her tirade over, she nodded vigorously in approval of herself. And as I was starting to find her increasingly likable, I asked myself an embarrassing question: if I weren’t French, if I observed her from a distance, would I find Marine Le Pen likable, too? In any case, one thing you can say about Meloni is that she’s the least poker-faced person imaginable: when something amuses her she bursts out laughing, if something bores her she rolls her eyes and lets out a huge sigh.
After an hour and a half, as expected, we’d got nowhere. Trump condescended to quip to Keir Starmer: “You say you’re a democracy but that’s not true: you’ve got a king.” Starmer laughed a little obsequiously, relieved like someone who’s been struck by lightning once and is unlikely to be struck again. He was wrong: a few hours later, standing with Trump outside the hotel, the latter let a sheaf of papers slip from a folder, scattering them on the ground, and as he made no move to pick them up, it was Starmer who, after a moment’s hesitation, bent down and literally knelt at the master’s feet – a devastating image that of course went around the world.
Afterwards in smaller rooms there were a few bilats – as bilateral discussions between two leaders are called. I attended the ones between Macron and Starmer and then Macron and Carney: they made little impression on me. At the end of the afternoon, Macron held an impromptu press conference outside the hotel. Asked if he approved of the Israeli strikes on Iran and the prospect of a regime change in Tehran, he replied that however detestable the regime may be, revolutions imposed from outside rarely end well. Just look at Iraq and Libya.
“How do you intepret [Trump’s] apparent sudden departure from the G7?” the journalist went on. Most of us present at this exchange weren’t aware that Trump had left, and the announcement left us stunned. For a moment Macron himself seemed taken aback. “I think,” he said, “he’s gone to negotiate a ceasefire between Iran and Israel.”
Macron’s intention, in my opinion, was to politely clear Trump of accusations that he’d been boorish and had a temper tantrum, but the lightning strike was not long in coming. Arriving in Washington a few hours later, Trump said he hadn’t been going to negotiate a ceasefire but something “much bigger” (which was true: after three days of hesitation, the US joined the war alongside Israel). Trump added that while Macron is a “nice guy”, he’s “publicity seeking” and, later, that he “doesn’t get it right too often”, to which Macron responded with a shrug and no hard feelings: this wasn’t the first or last comment of its kind, a jibe between friends who get on well despite the odd squabble. (As Reagan put it when he was told in 1981 that Israel had just bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor: “Boys will be boys.”)
5. The owl on the T-shirt
With the Rat gone, the tension subsided. We could breathe again but there was no denying that the game had lost some of its appeal. Even though the second day was no more than a half day it dragged on, which was all the crueller given that its star was Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Invited by the G7, he had travelled more than 3,000 miles just to see Trump and beg him once again not to completely abandon Ukraine, and Trump once again humiliated him, this time by leaving just before he arrived.
At least, I assume that’s what Trump must have believed, that he was humiliating Zelenskyy. Personally, I belong to those who think that a scene as appalling as the one that took place in February in the Oval Office only served to demean Trump and uplift Zelenskyy. I also think that, despite their difference in size, Zelenskyy outdoes Trump in courage and strength – including physical strength – and that in a normal world his normal reaction would have been quite simply to grab Trump by the lapels of his midnight blue suit and give his face a good head-butt. But we live under the unchallenged reign of the most vicious of Rats, Zelenskyy is fighting for a country at war, and for him heroism consists of enduring one insult after another and saying thank you.
Gathered around him for the final plenary session, the other members of the G7 took advantage of Trump’s absence to show Zelenskyy nothing but concern and understanding. When Merz said that the military approach is at an impasse and that what’s needed now is to refine the sanctions, Zelenskyy replied that yes, of course, he’s in favour of sanctions, but that while waiting for them to take effect Ukraine has to keep hold of its territory, so he needs weapons (“I need ammo”, as always).
Everyone nodded: we get you, Volodymyr, we’re with you, Volodymyr, and of course Russia is the aggressor – a statement that is nowadays in the same “provocative” category as saying that the climate crisis is real. Meloni summed up the general feeling by exclaiming: “Don’t kid yourselves, my friends. He [Putin] doesn’t just want 20% of Volodymyr’s country, he wants 100%, and he won’t stop there. He wants to restore his empire. As if you [putting her hand on Macron’s arm] wanted half the world because it used to be French colonies, or you [jerking her chin at Starmer, still reeling from the previous day] wanted the Commonwealth. And while we’re at it, why don’t I rebuild the Roman empire?”
Macron smiled indulgently. My photographer friend said this morning: “He’s in seventh heaven now that Trump has split. Now he’s the alpha male.” And in fact, with his arms crossed and his chest thrown back as if to take stock of the bigger picture, our PR had assumed with visible pleasure the role of the adult in the room.
On the plane home a few hours later he had once again swapped his suit for a black T-shirt, which I noticed was emblazoned with a small owl, and this suddenly reminded me of the speech he’d given seven years before, an eternity ago, in Athens, on European civilisation. He quoted Hegel’s observation that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk” – in other words, that any stage in history can only be properly understood when that moment has almost passed. He was pleased that I noticed this: of course the little owl wasn’t on his T-shirt by chance. Of course – to repeat his much-mocked mantra – he wants to write history and understand it “at the same time”.
I scribbled down a few things he said to me during the last dinner at the oval table, so quickly in fact that I’m having a hard time reading them now. It was too noisy to record, everyone (PR+20, I’d say) was talking loudly, laughing loudly, everyone was a little euphoric from the adrenaline, the fatigue and because things hadn’t gone too badly – even if, “deep down”, we had nothing to show: no joint declaration, not even the hint of a roadmap for anything at all. He talked about cognitive bubbles (“Of course Trump lives in a cognitive bubble, but so do I, so do you, that’s something one has to be at least a little aware of”); the advantages and drawbacks of thinking in a “contrarian” way – that is, in opposition to popular opinion (“Like an idiot I followed Javier Milei’s X account, and when I read his posts I realise that I’m capable of agreeing with him”); and double standards, an obsession of his (“If things go on like this, between Ukraine and Gaza we’ll end up losing what little credibility we have left. Europe will have missed its chance”).
But what struck me most was what he said with sudden forcefulness about teens and teenagers – I don’t remember how we got there: “I was never a teenager. I don’t like teenagers. I don’t understand them [it’s rare for Macron to say he doesn’t understand something]. My wife understands them.” I thought to myself: he was a teenager when they met, and maybe if she hadn’t understood teenagers he wouldn’t be in his PR plane today, with his little owl of Minerva emblazoned on his black bodybuilder’s T-shirt. And then, the final word before going to sleep – even him – for two or three hours. Apparently it was something his grandmother used to say, and those around him know it by heart and await it with a blend of complicit mirth and mild concern, because beneath its kindness lies a threat: “OK, everyone to bed. Have the night you deserve.”
Translated by John Lambert