Everything was fine. An ordinarily happy life. Then one night Claude Pinault wakes up with a sudden sharp pain. Earache? He’s used to them, he gets them a lot. But in the morning, he can’t get out of bed. His body won’t obey him. It’s as though he’s locked inside a machine that’s out of whack, imprisoned inside a jar. Doctors tell him the name of this awful disease: Guillain-Barré syndrome, which affects the peripheral nervous cases. In many cases, it’s life-threatening. It’s the beginning of a long slide down. A veritable Way of the Cross. Turned into an object in the hands of doctors and nurses, the patient is cut off from his own life. An omen? He had loved Jean-Dominique Bauby’s book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which he had given to several friends. Spared in the end, marveling at being back in the world of the living, he wanted to bear witness in his turn. Reading between the lines, we see something that contributed to his survival: a fabulous sense of humor, like a revenge on his fate. Reading Jean-Louis Fournier’s recent book about his handicapped sons, you can’t help thinking that Pinault found the same comfort in black comedy.