"The mirror stage is an identification in the full sense of the term: the transformation produced in the subject when he assumes an image."
— Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Seuil, 1966)
March, D-38, five weeks before the election[^1]
The studio was too cold. The air conditioning blew through ceiling vents, a dry air that smelled of warm plastic and air freshener. Gabriel's hands were clammy. He wiped them on his trousers, under the table, while the makeup artist dabbed his forehead with a sponge.
— You're shining, she said. Hold still.
Without moving, he let her work. She stepped back, examined, nodded. Her nails were painted red, a dark red that looked like dried blood. She disappeared into the shadows behind the lights.
The set was bare. A white table, two chairs, a giant screen displaying the logo of Le Débat: a red arrow cutting through a blue circle. An arrow pointing nowhere. A circle containing nothing.
The screen came on.
Élisabeth Vernet appeared, seated at an identical table, in an identical studio, three hundred kilometres away. She was immaculate. Too immaculate. Every strand of her grey hair was perfectly defined. The folds of her blouse fell like lines on an architect's blueprint. The light came from everywhere and nowhere, a lighting that erased the shadows under her eyes, the fine lines around her mouth, the weight she must nonetheless carry.
She smiled.
— Gabriel. Delighted to see you.
Her voice arrived with an imperceptible delay: half a breath, a quarter of a second, just enough for the brain to know that something was off. The VIVRE technology. The perfect hologram. Life without the body.
— Élisabeth, said Gabriel.
The presenter sat down between them, on a chair that had not been there a minute before. A young man, white teeth, hair sculpted by a product that smelled of green apple. He turned toward the camera.
— Good evening. Tonight we welcome the two candidates leading the polls for the presidential election. Élisabeth Vernet, of the Progressive Party, and Gabriel Moreau, of the Independent Republican Movement. Ladies and gentlemen, the debate begins.
The questions fell like stones. Social security. Pensions. Immigration. Gabriel answered. He had prepared the figures, the arguments, the neat phrases that would make the headlines. He delivered them as one delivers parcels: precisely, mechanically, without passion.
Vernet answered too. Her answers were more fluid, more natural. She fixed the camera as though speaking to a single person, in a living room, on a winter evening. Her eyes never met Gabriel's.
He understood why.
She couldn't see him. She saw a place to rest her gaze, a point in space, a target. He was on her screen, a video feed she could minimize, enlarge, pause. He was not in the room.
He was elsewhere.
— Monsieur Moreau, said the presenter, you spoke of inequality. Could you be more specific?
Gabriel leaned forward. The studio lights warmed his face. He could feel sweat beading beneath the powder the makeup artist had applied.
— The gap between the top 1% and the rest of this country has grown by 40% over the past ten years. That is not an opinion. It is a fact. The data comes from INSEE, from the Banque de France, from—
He stopped.
The ticker at the bottom of the screen had changed. It read: "Moreau: 'The gap is only 40%' — implying it should be smaller."
— That's false, said Gabriel.
The presenter smiled.
— I beg your pardon?
— The ticker. It says I said "only 40%." I said "has grown by 40%." Those are not the same thing.
The presenter's smile did not move. It was a plaster smile, a smile that had been applied that morning and would not come off before the end of the broadcast.
— I'm sure our team will correct that, he said. Let's continue.
The ticker changed. It now read: "Moreau contradicts our graphics team."
Gabriel felt his jaw tighten. He opened his mouth to respond, to explain, to say that this was not a contradiction but a correction, that words were not interchangeable, that language was not decoration.
— And on the question of pensions, said the presenter, Madame Vernet, you have proposed raising the legal retirement age to sixty-seven. Could you walk us through your reasoning?
Élisabeth Vernet spoke. Her voice was calm, measured, reasonable. She explained that the accounts did not add up, that the figures were what they were, that difficult choices had to be made. She had the air of someone delivering bad news to a friend: sorry, but sincere.
Gabriel listened. He watched the ticker beneath Élisabeth Vernet's face: "Vernet: 'Difficult choices' — a leader who takes responsibility."
His hands, on the table, caught his attention. Fingers splayed, knuckles white, they seemed not to belong to him. He opened them. Let the blood return.
The broadcast continued.
The questions. The answers. The smiles. The tickers reading what he had not said, writing history before it was finished, turning every sentence into a trap.
At one point, he spoke about education. He said that state schools were underfunded, that teachers were exhausted, that children from poor neighbourhoods did not have the same opportunities as those from wealthy ones. The ticker wrote: "Moreau: 'The state school system is bankrupt' — a candidate abandoning the republican ideal."
He said nothing.
He carried on.
When the broadcast ended, the presenter shook Gabriel's hand — a limp, lifeless hand — then turned toward the screen where Vernet was still smiling.
— Excellent debate, he said. Thank you to all our guests.
The screen went dark. The Le Débat logo reappeared. The red arrow turned inside the blue circle, turned and turned, never stopping.
Gabriel did not move from his chair.
The makeup artist came back, wiped his forehead with a cleansing wipe, disappeared. The presenter was talking into his earpiece, laughing at something someone was saying at the other end of the line. The lights went out one by one.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He reached for it. The screen showed a push notification: "Moreau MELTS DOWN on set. Watch the video."
He pressed it.
The video was forty-five seconds long. It was him, frozen in close-up, face taut, jaw clenched. The ticker at the bottom of the screen read: "Moreau: 'The gap is only 40%' — implying it should be smaller." His mouth was moving — he could see himself speaking, saying something — but the sound was cut.
Then a cut. His face again. Eyes narrowed. Mouth open, as if he were shouting. The ticker: "Moreau contradicts our graphics team."
Then another cut. The presenter smiling. The logo. The end.
Two hundred thousand views.
The comments were a sewer. He read only the first three. The fourth was a photo of him, head cropped, pasted onto the body of a clown. He turned the phone off.
He put it back in his pocket.
He stood up. The chair scraped across the floor. The sound echoed through the empty studio.
— Monsieur Moreau?
An assistant, young, hair pulled back in a ponytail, a lanyard around her neck. She was holding a tablet.
— Your taxi is waiting.
— Thank you, said Gabriel.
He crossed the set. His footsteps made a hollow sound on the floor. He passed the giant screen, switched off, black, where his reflection walked alongside him, a colourless ghost.
Outside, it was raining.
The car headed south. Gabriel sat in the back, the window open, the damp air striking his face. The driver was listening to the radio: a jazz station, a trumpet rising and falling like a breath.
Gabriel let his gaze drift across the motorway signs. The names of towns scrolled past. The distances. The number of kilometres separating him from something he could not have named.
He had made the decision without thinking. Leaving the studio, he had climbed into the back of the taxi and given an address: "Le hameau de Sartre, in Antraigues-sur-Volane. In the Ardèche." The driver had raised an eyebrow: "Five hundred and eighty kilometres, monsieur." Gabriel had held out his card. The driver had typed the address into the GPS — the national road, the D104, the bends of the Volane valley — and the car had set off.
His mobile rang in his pocket. Marianne. A glance at the screen, her name, and he put the phone away. She rang seventeen times. He did not answer.
The rain stopped near Valence. The sky cleared, turned pale grey, then dark grey, then black. Night fell like a curtain.
The car left the motorway, took departmental roads, tight bends between hills covered in oak and box. The headlights lit up stone walls, electricity poles, rusted signs bearing the names of forgotten hamlets.
The driver pulled up in front of a stone house at the end of a dirt track. He cut the engine.
— This is it?
— Yes, said Gabriel. Thank you.
He got out. The car turned around, tyres crunching on the gravel, and disappeared into the night.
The space emptied around him.
The house was dark. The shutters were closed. The red-tiled roof gleamed in the moonlight. A vine climbed the wall, its dead leaves clinging to the branches like skeletal fingers.
He pulled the key from his pocket. An iron key, heavy and old, the same one his grandfather had used fifty years before. He inserted it into the lock. The mechanism resisted, groaned, then gave way.
He knew that sound by heart: the bolt that hesitates, the wood that yields, the cold air escaping like a held breath. The house recognised him by the way he pressed on the key. Since his grandfather's death, he came back whenever the world grew too loud. He told no one. He left no message. He came, he sat down, he waited for the silence to do its work.
The door opened.
The smell hit him first. Dust. Dry wood. Cold ash. The smell of childhood, of summers spent in this house, of winters when the wind whistled in the chimneys and his grandfather read the newspaper by the light of an oil lamp.
He went in. Closed the door behind him.
The darkness was total. He did not look for the light switch: a light, at this hour, in this house, would have cried his name all the way to the village. He took out his phone, switched on the torch.
The beam lit up the room.
The wooden table. The mismatched chairs. The cold fireplace, logs stacked beside it, grey ash in the grate. The shelves lined with books, their spines bleached by the sun, their titles worn away by time.
On the wall, above the fireplace, a framed photograph.
His grandfather.
He was standing in front of a printing press, his hands black with ink, a leather apron around his waist. He was smiling. Not a smile for the camera: a real smile, the one he had when he talked about his trade, when he told stories about the nights spent setting pages, checking the type, pulling proofs.
He always said the same thing: "The press is freedom. Whoever prints controls what people read. Whoever controls what people read controls what they think. So the press must be free. That's all. It's simple."
Simple.
Gabriel sat down at the table. The chair creaked under his weight. He set the phone on the wood, torch on, the beam pointing at the ceiling.
The light cast shifting shadows. The beams blackened by smoke. The cobwebs in the corners. The dust floating in the air.
He did not move.
He listened to the wind in the chimney. A hollow, deep sound, like breathing. The house breathed around him, old, winded, full of memories he had not known how to keep.
He thought of his grandfather.
He thought of the press.
He thought of the tickers writing lies, of the videos lying in images, of the comments screaming into the void, of the people who read, believed, shared, without ever checking, without ever doubting, without ever asking whether what they saw was true.
He thought of the black box.
He had not taken it. He had not brought it with him. The object had remained in his hotel room, on the bedside table, beside the switched-off phone. He could not have said whether that was a decision or a cowardice.
He could no longer tell the difference.
The night passed.
He sank into the darkness, seated, motionless, hands flat on the table, back straight, eyes open. He did not sleep. He did not cry. He did not move. He listened to the wind, his eyes fixed on the photograph of his grandfather smiling in front of a machine that told the truth.
In the morning, grey light filtered through the gaps in the shutters. Dust danced in the beams. Gabriel stood up. His joints cracked. He was cold.
He went into the kitchen. The tap spat rust-coloured water, then clear. He drank from the cup of his hand. The water tasted of stone and metal.
He went back into the main room. Stopped in front of the photograph.
His grandfather's gaze, frozen in the photo, passed straight through him.
Clear eyes, grey beard, hands on the press as one touches a friend.
— I don't know what to do, said Gabriel aloud.
Silence answered.
He stood there, arms hanging at his sides, studying the face of a dead man who had seen more than he had.
Outside, the wind rose. The shutters banged. The house groaned.
Gabriel did not move.
He waited for something to happen. For the answer to come. For the photograph to speak, for the wall to open, for the truth to show itself.
Nothing came.
He was alone.
He was always alone.
He sat down on the floor, back against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest, and he followed the light across the floorboards, the shadows shortening, the day rising over a world he no longer recognized.
The photograph, above him, went on smiling.
[^1]: Author's note. The mirror stage is a foundational concept of Jacques Lacan, developed in his essay "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function" (1949, in Écrits, Seuil, 1966). It is the moment when the child, between 6 and 18 months, recognizes its image in the mirror and integrates it as its own, yet this image remains external, alienated, at once itself and not itself.