The narrator describes how he found out about Jean-François de La Harpe as a student. Born in Paris on November 20, 1739, into a family of extremely modest means, La Harpe escaped from what would have seemed to be his fate through Literature, which he arrived at via the theatre. Friendly with Voltaire, elected to the Académie Française in 1776, he amassed numerous literary prizes, as well as writing diatribes against whatever annoyed him. He became a critic for Mercure, was a proponent of a philosophy without excess, taught literature at the Lycée. During the French Revolution, La Harpe was an ardent republican. He wound up getting arrested, and owed his life to the events of 9 Thermidor. In prison, he converted. The Directoire persecuted his stands and ideas. A second warrant of arrest was pronounced against him in 1797. He went first into hiding and then into an exile in Corbeil that didn’t end until early 1800. He only returned to Paris, a sick man, at the end of the year, and died there on February 11, 1803.

The rise and fall of a man of letters. Who remembers Jean-François de La Harpe today? The narrator, admirer of this forgotten author, travels back in time. Why do we become attached to ghosts? What is the meaning of success? Of death and oblivion? As in 16, rue d’Avelghem and La Ballade de Lola, the narrator leads the investigation. For he knows that what he has become today, two hundred years later, he owes, at least in part, to La Harpe. As for Xavier Houssin’s writing, it has never been this lovely or poetic. Adept of the fragment, the dazzling outburst, Xavier Houssin is also related to authors who are alive and well, like Christian Bobin and Philippe Delerm.