Emmanuel Carrère Writes His Way Through a Breakdown

France’s renowned author, known for his penetrating portraits of murderers and disaster victims, trains his eye on his own emotional collapse.
Emmanuel Carrère poses looking to the side with his hands in his pockets.
Carrère’s friend Hervé Clerc says, “He’s very self-involved, but also very able to see the subtle character of others.”Photograph by Sofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello for The New Yorker

Emmanuel Carrère, who writes with the clear-eyed judgment of someone who has trained himself, against instinct, to take an interest in other people, was eating lunch one day last fall in a restaurant in north-central Paris. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, a film director and Carrère’s partner, had joined him; they live nearby, in an apartment as spare and as sunny as one in a yogurt commercial. The restaurant, her choice, was more modish and vegetarian than he might have chosen. Carrère’s manner was measured, almost courtly; his smile resembles a wince. After lunch, he would walk a mile and a half south, to the Palais de Justice, to spend the afternoon at the trial of men accused of involvement in the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks that killed a hundred and thirty people, ninety of them at a rock concert in the Bataclan theatre.

He’d been attending the trial since its start, weeks earlier, and his fame had initially caused a stir on the press benches. Carrère, who is sixty-four and has cropped hair and a lean, lined face that gives the false impression of a life spent outdoors, was once a novelist. Today, he is France’s best-known writer of literary nonfiction, or what one Paris critic has called “sublimated journalism.” Since the turn of the millennium, Carrère has published a series of best-sellers that set engrossing character studies—of a Frenchman who murdered his family; an optimistic young woman in a small Russian city; Luke the Evangelist—alongside what he knows about himself, including tendencies toward melancholy, vanity, and undependability. His writing’s appeal derives equally from its candor and its narrative brio. Carrère has written, “I know nothing other than my own ego.” His chosen form could be described as comparative self-portraiture: he looks out at the world, then looks in, then out again, and assembles it all into an artful collage. In his hands, the narcissistic lament “What about me?” becomes a potent observational tool. Carrère, in his portrait of Luke, cites the Rogier van der Weyden painting “St. Luke Drawing the Virgin.” Van der Weyden is thought to have used his own face as Luke’s. “I’m doing the same thing in another way,” Carrère writes.

His books often enact the experience of someone being brought out of himself—diverted from disappointment or dickishness—by the unearthing of a story worth telling and by the desire to be admired for telling it. (He has written that he is “obsessed with being a great writer.”) Carrère is drawn to material in which people become cut off from the rest of us by extreme circumstances—in particular, by violence. His narrative voice is confiding, comradely. He’ll write a passage that has a fiction writer’s fluidity and sense of drama, then reintroduce himself to the reader with a conversational aside: “You get the idea”; “Maybe I’m on thin ice here, but . . .” Hervé Clerc, Carrère’s closest male friend, who has been scrutinized by him in print more than once, told me, “It’s a kind of paradox. He’s very self-involved, but also very able to see the subtle character of others. He can see in me things which I don’t see myself.”

Lives Other Than My Own” (2009), one of the books on which Carrère’s reputation is founded, starts with a beach vacation that he took in Sri Lanka in 2004. Carrère begins, “The night before the wave, I remember that Hélène and I talked about separating.” He is referring to Hélène Devynck, then a television journalist, who later became Carrère’s second wife, and with whom he has a daughter. When a catastrophic tsunami interrupts their trip, Carrère is momentarily energized—“our flagging vacation had received an extraordinary jolt”—then sulkily conscious that, compared with Devynck, he’s useless. As she files news reports and looks for ways to be helpful, he feels like “a cautious and caustic diplomat, perfectly suited to cocktails and garden parties at the embassy but who, when the Khmer Rouge surround the place, fails to measure up, dithers.”

But these early pages also contain intense sketches of tourists in the first shock of grief for a lost family member. If Carrère is dithering, he’s also paying attention to suffering—recording the happiness that existed in these lives just a day or two earlier, and capturing how the plot twist of disaster has made people look and sound. He meets a British woman who has lost her girlfriend. “I imagined the two of them getting on in years, living in a lovingly tended house in an English town, taking part in its social life, going on a yearly trip to some distant country, putting together their photo albums,” he writes. “All that shattered. The survivor’s return; the empty house. Each woman’s mug with her name on it.”

When Carrère and Devynck return to France, they make several visits to the home of Devynck’s sister Juliette, a judge, who is dying of cancer, more than a decade after being disabled by the disease in adolescence. And Carrère expands on what to him is the mystery of people wanting to help others. The book has some of the shape of a memoir—it’s a year or two in Carrère’s life; there are scenes of family, writing, sex—but it also has an overarching subject: the claim made on us by people who have no reason to be in our memoirs. And that subject, appropriately, distorts this memoir’s form. At the book’s narrative and moral center is a colleague of Juliette’s, Étienne Rigal, who, like her, developed cancer early in life. These two judges did groundbreaking work, in relative obscurity, to protect low-income debtors brought to court by predatory lenders. Carrère describes that achievement in technical detail, after first immersing us in Rigal’s experience of illness and, at twenty-two, of having his leg amputated. (“When he holds out his boxers with both hands and bends over, he will first make as if to put his left foot through the left opening, knowing perfectly well, seeing perfectly clearly, that he no longer has a left foot.”) After the book was published, someone who met Rigal for the first time broke off from their conversation, distracted by memories of Carrère’s portrait, saying, “It’s like talking to Madame Bovary.”

François Samuelson, Carrère’s agent, told me that another client of his, the novelist Michel Houellebecq, once described himself and Carrère as the best living writers in France (leaving little doubt about who ranked first). When recently asked about this, Houellebecq said that he didn’t recall making the claim, but that it was certainly a defensible one. Houellebecq has written that Carrère “knows when the behavior of his characters is estimable, admirable, odious, morally neutral. He can have doubts about everything, but not about that.” He has also recalled his reaction to the line about the English mugs: “I burst into tears, and had to put the book down, unable for a few minutes to continue reading.”

When I met Carrère and Bourgeois-Tacquet for lunch, the terrorism trial was in its second month—and was expected to last well into 2022. Carrère’s sustained attendance would surely yield a book, but its form wasn’t yet evident to him. Meanwhile, he was writing a weekly column for L’Obs, a magazine that referred to him again and again as “the great writer Emmanuel Carrère.” (He ultimately decided to publish an expanded rendering of the columns, which will be issued later this year.)

In the trial’s first weeks, most of the witnesses had been survivors, or family members of victims. Day after day, they had described the same scenes of blood, disfigurement, and terror. A column that Carrère had just begun writing described this repetition as having “the beauty of a shared story and the cruelty of a casting.”

Bourgeois-Tacquet met Carrère four years ago, as he was coming out of a period of mental—and marital—collapse that is recounted in “Yoga,” his latest book, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in August. When “Yoga” appeared in France, in 2020, it generated weeks of commentary, not least because Devynck, now Carrère’s ex-wife, revealed that he’d recently signed a contract promising not to write about her without her permission.

Bourgeois-Tacquet had discouraged Carrère from taking on the story of the trial—the subject was too distressing. “I almost quit him,” she told me at lunch, speaking lightly, but only half joking. “I thought it wasn’t a good idea for him.”

“Our life didn’t become a nightmare,” Carrère said.

“Not yet,” she replied. “After one year of listening, writing, you could be overwhelmed by the material.”

“You can’t prepare yourself for a possible catastrophe,” he said. Carrère, who has also written and directed movies, mentioned a response that a cinematographer he has worked with gives to any question about a film shoot’s future: “We’ll see when we get there.”

“Nature, nurture—either way, it’s still all your fault.”
Cartoon by Barbara Smaller

“Life gives you a lot of catastrophes,” Bourgeois-Tacquet told Carrère. “You’re not obliged to chase them.” She is thirty-six. Her first feature, “Anaïs in Love,” released in the U.S. in April, is a breezy Parisian comedy: summer dresses, adultery, talk of Marguerite Duras.

She began telling me how her understanding of Carrère’s character had changed since they’d met. (Carrère’s posture of self-disclosure, in print, gives permission to others.) He laughed and announced, “I’m going to the bathroom.”

“He’s a little bit autistic,” Bourgeois-Tacquet said. (I later heard Carrère apply the same word to himself, though neither he nor Bourgeois-Tacquet intended to suggest an actual diagnosis.) “It took me time to discover this. For several months, I didn’t understand. So I was, like, crashing against a wall.” She went on, “It’s an effort for him to get interested in others. Empathy, it’s not really developed. And, in a love relationship, it’s sometimes hard.”

After Carrère returned to his seat, she added, “He recently told me the most important thing in his life was his books, not human beings.”

He gave her a look.

“That’s true!” she said.

A nod, acceptance: “That’s true.”

Carrère’s “The Adversary,” published in 2000, starts:

On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal.

In 1993, Carrère was in his mid-thirties, recently married to his first wife, Anne Devauchelle, and the father of two boys. When I asked Emmelene Landon, a painter and a writer who has been Carrère’s friend since the eighties, to recall him as a younger man, she did a teasing mime of someone pushing back a romantic lock of hair from his forehead. His intelligence was remarkable, she said, but so was his incapacity for embarrassment. He never disguised the moment when he lost interest in a conversation, and didn’t think to ask before turning off the music when visiting someone’s apartment.

He grew up in a comfortable, academic Paris home. He was an “odd little boy,” he told me, who wasn’t quite at ease among his peers. Emmanuel’s mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, who has aristocratic Russian roots, is the author of “The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917-1930” and other histories of Russia and the Soviet Union; she was once a conservative member of the European Parliament. Her husband, born Louis Carrère, is a retired executive. Both are in their nineties. Louis and Hélène’s adoption of “d’Encausse”—from Dencausse, Louis’s mother’s name—indicates an interest in perceived poshness. (One of Emmanuel’s two sisters has followed this lead.) Carrère has not written at length about his parents. “I’m supposed to be a very take-no-prisoners writer, but maybe I don’t dare,” he told me. Yet he has observed that he and his mother share an appetite for glory—a need to “occupy as much room as I can in other people’s minds.” For the past twenty years, she has been the Perpetual Secretary of the Académie Française, the French language’s Supreme Court. The position, one of immense prestige and pomp, comes with a sword and with what her son calls a “huge apartment,” in the seventeenth-century Institut de France. She and Louis follow a conversational convention unlikely to survive their generation: they address each other as vous, not the familiar tu.

In France, “literature means ‘novel,’ ” Carrère told me, during one of the several times we met in Paris last fall. A writer with literary ambitions who does something different “is a bit specialized, a bit strange.” He noted that his mother shares this view: “Autobiographical books are absolutely not her cup of tea. It’s contrary to her philosophy of life.” (She has admiringly compared Houellebecq to Victor Hugo.) After Emmanuel graduated from Sciences Po—the college attended by his mother, and by more than a dozen French Presidents and Prime Ministers—he had a career in film criticism. And shortly before the Romand killings, to help pull himself out of a period of gloomy unproductiveness—which was also a religious phase, with Bible reading and daily attendance at Mass—he wrote a short, somewhat slapdash book about Philip K. Dick, the science-fiction writer. He also wrote a few magazine accounts of trials involving violent crimes: infanticide, attempted matricide.

But at the time of the Romand murders Carrère was known primarily for writing novels—of an admired, if sometimes convoluted, stories-about-stories kind. He had published four, the third of which, “The Mustache” (1986), had the plainest surface and reached the widest audience. Carrère has described it as “the first one that was readable.” A man shaves off his mustache, then finds himself in a world unwilling to accept that he ever had one. (“You know very well that you never had a mustache. Stop it, please.”) The novel covers a period of about twelve days; it took Carrère about twelve days to write. Like much of the science fiction that Carrère adored as a teen-ager, it scrupulously follows the logic of a simple rupture-in-reality premise. John Updike, writing in this magazine, called it “glossy and inexorable, like a machine with one lost gear tooth,” and interpreted it as a study of detachment: “We are solipsists who in uneasy conjunction with other solipsists construct a society and a shared world.”

Carrère has said that, on learning of Romand’s crimes, he knew immediately that he would write a book about him—with Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” as his inevitable model. Romand had lived in a French town on the Swiss border. His neighbors, his wife, and his children all understood him to be a doctor with a grand research job at the World Health Organization, in Geneva. In fact, Romand had left medical school without passing his exams, and he had no job. For years, he spent his days just driving around, or reading in his car at highway rest stops. He paid for this existence partly with money he’d taken from family members, having promised to invest it in exotic funds. Like the man in “The Mustache”—and, one could say, a social but awkward young writer—Romand gave the impression of living among other people, even as he lived in solitude alongside them. As his life unravelled, he began telling people that he had cancer. Carrère has written, “Everyone concurs that he was a nice guy, eager to please, afraid of hurting people’s feelings: so afraid that he preferred to kill his whole family rather than hurt their feelings.”

According to Carrère’s later accounts, he reread Capote. He wrote to Romand, who was in jail, saying, “What you have done is not in my eyes the deed of a common criminal, or that of a madman, either, but the action of someone pushed to the limit by overwhelming forces.” He enclosed his recent Dick biography. After he sent off this package, it struck him that the book’s title—“I Am Alive and You Are Dead”—might land weirdly in Romand’s cell.

Romand didn’t reply. Carrère then tried, unsuccessfully, to render the story as fiction. He went on to write an arresting short novel, “Class Trip” (1995), in which a violent crime is seen through the eyes of a miserably self-conscious boy on a school-sponsored ski trip.

Two years after Carrère wrote to Romand, he received a response that included praise for “Class Trip.” Romand’s trial would soon begin. Carrère attended the proceedings—which ended in Romand being sentenced to a minimum of twenty-two years in prison—and accepted some guidance from him about further research. He worked on a first draft. Carrère described this as “a pile of beginnings.” For example, one version introduced the crime from the perspective of a neighbor, who was a doctor: “On Monday January 11th, 1993, just after four in the morning, the phone rang in the home, near Ferney-Voltaire, of Dr. Marc Vital-Durand. Such calls, at night, are routine for a doctor. He picked up with a sigh, but without anxiety. Françoise, his wife, pulled the covers over her head, to block the light from a lamp that he turned on. She heard him make brief, neutral comments that didn’t indicate whether or not the call was serious. ‘Yes . . . Really? . . . Shit!’ (He said that often; it didn’t really mean anything). ‘O.K., I’m on my way.’ ”

The manuscript was growing, but Carrère was anxious about it—some passages “didn’t sound right.” At one point, he told Romand that he was setting the work aside. Only after that, as he was writing himself a memo, did he discover a way to tell the story. (“The best way to get something done is to renounce it,” he told me.) Carrère would largely junk the idea of a smoothly omniscient, Capote-like voice. He’d not only accept the fact of his subjectivity; he’d measure it, report on it. He worked with uncharacteristic slowness; he broke from the project, now and then, to write screenplays. Emmelene Landon recently recalled how weighed down he was by Romand’s crimes, and by papers that Romand had entrusted to him. “He’d move from place to place with those files,” she said. But eventually Carrère had a striking new draft, which contained long autobiographical digressions; a critique of the obsequious tone of his letters to Romand; and a hint of the idea that some part of Romand’s problem was that his sex life didn’t measure up to Carrère’s.

When I spoke with Carrère one day, in a quiet café where he reads Le Monde on his phone each morning, he told me about a celebrated film director he’d once met at a festival. He admired the man’s work but was amused by the gravity with which he expressed himself in everyday conversations. Carrère recalled, laughing, “He says things like”—slow, serious voice—“ ‘Women are often late.’ And he said this one thing about a film. He said, ‘It’s not bad, it’s wrong.’ ” Carrère remains struck by this. “I think it’s an extraordinary sentence,” he said. It helped him understand his dissatisfaction with “In Cold Blood,” a book that “pretends to objectivity” and declines to acknowledge that its author was impatient to see the accused hanged. “It’s not bad—it’s more than excellent,” he said. “But there is something wrong in the idea of the book.”

“The Adversary” was a global success. Since its publication, Carrère has continued to tack between fact and fiction; he directed a deft adaptation of “The Mustache,” and he helped create “Les Revenants,” an award-winning TV show that imagines a town in which a dozen dead residents reappear alive. But he has not written another novel.

Last fall, visitors to the terrorism trial at the Palais de Justice had to pass through half a dozen security checks. To avoid everyone needing to do this more than once, proceedings didn’t start until after lunch.

I went with Carrère one afternoon. We sat on benches that had come to be used both by reporters and by the two thousand or so parties civiles—the interested parties directly affected by the killings (survivors, the bereaved), all of whom could testify in court. They wore color-coded lanyards: green indicated a readiness to grant media interviews; red meant the opposite. Carrère had observed that some people wore both. The courtroom was a long, handsome box of pale wood that—for reasons of security and necessary scale—had been built for the event within a colonnaded hall.

Hélène Fresnel, a journalist Carrère knew, had been a partie civile at the 2020 trial of men connected to the January, 2015, attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Her partner, Bernard Maris, an economist and a journalist, was one of twelve people murdered that day. In “Yoga,” Carrère describes how, on a visit that Fresnel made to the morgue where Maris’s body was sent, she heard a mourning family speaking in Arabic in the room next door. Someone told her that these were relatives of Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, the brothers who had perpetrated the attack and who were shot dead by police after two days on the run. When Fresnel described her courtroom experience to Carrère, he scolded himself for not having thought to attend. She reminded him that the Bataclan trial had yet to begin. He spent last summer reading about Islamist terrorism. In the fall, he was reading Hannah Arendt.

Carrère, in jeans and a rain jacket, sat on the edge of the bench, looking around the room like someone worried about missing his train. He was carrying a hardback red notebook that I didn’t see him use that day. The trial wasn’t being broadcast, and no transcript was being published, but Carrère could always refer to accounts from the daily papers. And he was confident that the kind of small detail that might not make it into Le Monde tends to stick. “If it’s useful to remember that the carpet was green, you would remember,” he had told me. “And if you’re mistaken and say it was blue? Well, I’ll confess I’m wrong!” (Carrère has sometimes emphasized that what he writes is “all true,” but this refers to an avoidance of fictional embellishment rather than to a regime of rigorous fact checking. John Lambert, who has translated Carrère’s last four books into English, and admires him deeply, told me that Carrère is as likely to trust his memory of a literary quotation, or a movie plot, as he is to look it up. With Carrère’s permission, Lambert makes fixes.)

At the far end of the room were five judges. On the floor sat a court artist, with paintbrushes and a jar of water in front of him. Fourteen defendants were to the left, and eleven of them sat behind glass in a line that ended, farthest from us, with a man named Salah Abdeslam. On November 13, 2015, three groups of three jihadists attacked sites across Paris, including the Bataclan; seven of them died that night, and two others died during a subsequent police raid. It’s not disputed that Abdeslam began that evening as the tenth member of this cohort—he had been wearing an explosive belt. And, at the start of the trial, he declared his allegiance to ISIS. But he later told the court that he hadn’t killed anyone, and had removed the belt—it was found on a suburban sidewalk—after a change of heart and not, as others have proposed, because the device had malfunctioned. The charges against Abdeslam included murder. The three defendants not behind glass were accused of much lesser crimes and were not being held in custody; they came to court each day by public transit. (In late June, all the defendants were found guilty.)

One day a few weeks before we met, Carrère had varied his routine at the Palais de Justice: he had gone to a smaller courtroom, in the basement. As he later wrote in his L’Obs column, he had watched a prisoner—an “old gentleman” in a “sky-blue suit, matching scarf and pocket square, smoothed white hair, thin moustache”—greeting the public as he took his place in court. The man was Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, and he was mounting an end-of-the-line challenge to the life sentence he’d been given for a 1974 grenade attack on a Paris department store. His public that day, Carrère observed, included someone holding an anti-Semitic pamphlet; another attendee had the latest book by Éric Zemmour, the far-right 2022 Presidential candidate. Carrère found himself laughing quietly at the absurdity of Sánchez and his fan club.

“This is probably where we’ll part.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham

In 1974, at a time when a bourgeois Paris teen-ager might well have been drawn to revolutionary politics, Carrère was having extended discussions with record-store clerks about the comparative strengths of recordings of Bach oratorios. Today, he can approach a terrorism trial without having to account for any past support for political violence. Indeed, he has a kind of political innocence, or at least an instinct to abstain. “He’s not interested in politics,” Bourgeois-Tacquet told me. “I’m not, either.” It was a relief, she said, never to argue about such matters. In 2007, Carrère voted for the first time, to please Devynck. He has said that he distrusts his responses to broad sociological and political questions; he feels himself taking on the views of the last person he spoke to. (And he is awed by Houellebecq’s state-of-the-world assurance.) “I prefer not to talk about things, problems, issues where I don’t have a firsthand knowledge,” Carrère told me. “Which excludes a lot of things.” He added, “I prefer to rely on my experience, even if it’s very small. I don’t think that I know the truth, but I know at least the difficulties I have to know the truth.”

He was once friends with Renaud Camus, who, until the late nineties, was known as a novelist and a poet. Camus is now reviled as the far-right ideologue who fashioned the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which proposes that hidden forces are collaborating to insure that nonwhite populations become a majority in countries like France. Carrère’s response to Camus, at a time of rising popularity of far-right political figures in France, has been personal disappointment shaded with residual personal sympathy. In 2009, he put a Camus novel—along with others by W. G. Sebald and Edith Wharton—on a list of his twenty favorite books. In 2016, he described Camus as principled, if unquestionably wrong: “These delirious convictions remain those of a man of integrity, not a scoundrel.”

Carrère’s book about the terrorism trial, then, would likely not be as autobiographical as some of his other books—he told me that he had little about his own history to incorporate, and added that his current life lacked the context of crisis that has prompted his most personal work. But it would still be a book about his trial, and the trial of the people in pain around him. In an introductory column for L’Obs, last summer, Carrère wrote that he expected the event to teach him something about justice, and something about religion. “When it comes to God, where does madness begin?” he wrote. But his primary impulse, he said, was to experience being in the room. He wrote, “I think that between the day we enter this box and the day, still far off, still without a date, when we’ll leave it, something in us, participants and even observers, will have changed.”

Carrère’s creative missteps tend to have occurred in projects in which he did things differently, and allowed someone other than himself to claim a narrator’s role. In 2011, he published a biography of the swaggering (and fascistic) Russian writer and political activist Eduard Limonov. It was built largely out of Limonov’s own mythmaking accounts of his life. The book isn’t celebratory, but neither is it skeptical in any sustained way; Carrère plays a wingman’s role. More recently, he directed “Between Two Worlds,” a fictionalized adaptation of a book by Florence Aubenas, who disguised her journalistic identity to report on the unskilled-labor market in Caen, France. Carrère’s movie, which was released in France earlier this year, is about a bourgeois reporter negotiating the social and ethical complications of that kind of disguise—of not telling people that you’re planning to write about them while you clean toilets alongside them. A book about poverty became a movie about friendship and betrayal. It seems likely that if Carrère had written a book about Caen it would have found a way to be about all three.

Carrère told me that, a few days earlier, he’d heard an expression of hate in the courtroom for the first time. Patrick Jardin, a retired businessman whose daughter was killed in the Bataclan, expressed his regret that France no longer has the death penalty, and his disgust for people whose loathing for the perpetrators didn’t match his own. (Later, Jardin unsuccessfully ran for office in the 2022 legislative elections, as a candidate for the Reconquest Party, founded by Zemmour.) Jardin, in his testimony, mentioned a book that had been published two years earlier, in a spirit of liberal optimism; it took the form of conversations between Georges Salines, the father of Lola Salines, a Bataclan victim, and Azdyne Amimour, the father of Samy Amimour, who, after killing many in the concert hall, was blown up, on the theatre’s stage, by the explosives he was wearing. Jardin told the court that Georges Salines made him sick.

Carrère had chatted with Salines during breaks in the proceedings. He had heard him, and others, talk about their lack of rage. “That’s very civilized, and very beautiful—I admire these feelings,” Carrère had told me. “But there was at least one guy who said the unpleasant thing that people must feel. I felt that, at least once, it was necessary—I needed to hear that.” Carrère is a serious reporter, but his posture toward any story is that of a partie civile.

On the day of our visit, the court was hearing from experts in caring for disaster victims. Carrère seemed restless. He whispered to me that a man who was speaking seemed to be “auditioning for the role of most boring witness.” But after Marie-Claude Desjeux, the head of a victim-support organization, began testifying Carrère heard something that interested him. The presiding judge asked Desjeux if she thought it was useful for the court to show images of the attacks. The Charlie Hebdo trial had incorporated security-camera video. The new trial had used such material sparingly, as part of an institutional effort to make the event “as humanly delicate and careful as possible,” as Carrère put it.

Desjeux told the court, “Victims are capable of hearing everything,” adding that it can be helpful to understand what actually happened. For others, “there’s the possibility of leaving the room.” A young man to our right, a partie civile wearing a Ramones T-shirt, was taking notes. Carrère, whispering, asked him something about the history of this issue. When that query turned into a conversation, Carrère was untroubled by people in front of us who turned, frowning, to object.

We left and headed toward Carrère’s apartment. He talked about a number of “false victims” of November, 2015—including Alexandra Damien, a woman who claimed to have been at a bar that was attacked. She had shown reporters a scar that, she said, came from that night. (It was the result of a kite-surfing accident.) He recalled that the president of a group for victims of the attacks in which Damien became involved had told him, “She was completely lost. We liked her. We were the first friends of her life.” She had escaped social solitude by inserting herself into this community. For Damien, Carrère said, “it was an identity to be a victim.”

Carrère met Hervé Clerc, his close friend, in the late eighties, through a mutual godmother; their relationship was cemented on long hikes in Switzerland. They still take hiking trips at least once a year: they often walk in silence, out of sight of each other.

Clerc, a writer and a former editor at Agence France-Presse, has published books on Buddhism and other religious topics. He told me that when he’s on a hike he experiences nature as “an expression of eternity.” He suggested, with fond concern, that, although Carrère may well be happier on these walks than he is anywhere else, it’s not really the right kind of happiness: it’s a mere break from worldly agitation about work and reputation.

Clerc added that he has often encouraged Carrère to spend more time thinking about death. As he put it, paraphrasing a Buddhist source, Carrère does not pay enough attention to “the avalanche that will cover you in a very short time.”

The hikes are now more slowly paced. The two sons Carrère had with his first wife are adults; he’s been a grandfather since 2016. His daughter with Devynck, born a year and a half after the tsunami, is sixteen.

Carrère and Bourgeois-Tacquet’s apartment, which they moved into a year ago, is on the top floor of a building in a narrow nineteenth-century shopping arcade. The apartment has views of rooftops but of no human activity. In the kitchen, a small tree grows through a hole in the center of the table. When we spoke there one day, Carrère mentioned that his younger son, a journalist, has decided to own only one pair of pants. (He has other assets, including an apartment.) Carrère isn’t in denial about his own ability to acquire, and enjoy, bourgeois comforts. Once, when writing beside an infinity pool on a luxurious trip with his extended family to Phuket, Thailand—where Houellebecq’s novel “Platform” stages scenes of sex tourism—he registered that he was taking the most un-Houellebecquian vacation in the most Houellebecquian spot. But he admires his son’s instincts and shares them, up to a point: whenever he has moved, he has got rid of most of his stuff, including books. One object that has survived is a painting by Emmelene Landon, which he bought thirty years ago—an abstracted landscape of ochre and gray-green. It’s near him when he writes. When Bourgeois-Tacquet met Carrère, in 2018, he was recently separated from Devynck, and was living on a busy street above a South Asian specialty grocery, in an apartment that, in her view, was “very dark and ugly.” (Carrère disagrees.) It seemed to contain little besides a few dozen books about yoga and Landon’s painting.

In “Yoga,” Carrère recalls a period in his life that ends around the time Bourgeois-Tacquet first saw that home. He begins in January, 2015, about three years earlier. There is an element of terror in Carrère’s fascination with the ways that people can become marooned—buried alive, paralyzed, imprisoned, struck mute—but also a martyred acceptance of his own version of entrapment. Once, trying to understand his neutral response to a session inside a flotation tank, he wrote, “Mostly I’m in my inner world, of which I am tired and where I feel trapped. I dream of breaking out of my prison but can’t manage to do it. Why not? Because the idea frightens me and—harder to admit—I actually love my prison.” At the start of “Yoga,” he has signed up for a ten-day silent-meditation retreat in rural France: no talking, no writing, no phones. He had planned, he writes, to publish an “upbeat, subtle little book” about his longtime interest in yoga and meditation.

When I spoke with Bourgeois-Tacquet and François Samuelson, Carrère’s agent, they both scoffed at the idea that Carrère would ever have written such a book—and Carrère himself told me that the plan was probably an illusion. (Samuelson, an old friend of Carrère’s, is entertainingly intemperate: he told me that he had not liked “Yoga” as a title, and that he certainly hated yoga.) But the book’s first pages do have an unusual lightness, as Carrère faces the quandary of making judgments about people to whom he can’t speak. He’s also wistful, as he sits looking out over the damp landscape, about his inability to have a fully contemplative moment. “I don’t have direct access to experience, I always have to put it into words,” he writes. “I’m not saying that’s bad. It’s my reason for being, it’s why I’m here, and I’m not complaining, I’m terrifically lucky to have what’s known as a vocation. But all the same, how good it would be, how restful it would be, what a huge step forward it would be, if I could make fewer sentences and see a little more.”

Midway through the retreat, Carrère is summoned to an administrative office, where there’s no ban on talking. He’s told that “serious things have happened in our country.” He learns that Charlie Hebdo has been attacked, and that he has been asked to give a eulogy at the funeral of Bernard Maris, the economist. He writes, “I have to be honest, and I’m sure I’ll be understood: I felt a huge relief to learn that it was Bernard who’d died in a terrorist attack and not someone closer, not one of my children.”

He leaves the retreat and speaks at the funeral. And then—we’re nearly halfway into the book—something happens. He experiences a crisis of an unspecified kind. He refers, obliquely, to a happy life that is now coming to an end: “They say it’s only when you’re no longer happy that you realize you once were. For me that’s not true: for ten whole years I knew I was happy.” He also mentions having started an affair, at some imprecise earlier time, with someone he calls “the Gemini woman.” (The name refers to a little terra-cotta statue that she gave him.)

Devoted readers of Carrère will know a little more than is being said here. The four books he published in the years between “The Adversary” and the silent retreat contain ample information—names and dates—about his intellectual, emotional, and sexual life. The first, “My Life as a Russian Novel” (2007), described visits he’d made to a small city five hundred miles east of Moscow; disobeying his mother, he also told some family history. In the final years of the German Occupation of France, his Georgian-born grandfather, who was married to the daughter of a Russian aristocrat, collaborated with the Germans, as an interpreter. He disappeared in 1944, and is presumed to have been executed by Resistance forces; his body was never found. In this period, Carrère writes, “there was one truth everyone agreed on: Resistance fighters were heroes, collaborators were scum. In my grandmother’s home, however, another truth reigned: Resistance members had abducted and probably killed the head of the family, who had been a collaborator and who they knew for a fact was not scum. He was moody and often angry, but he was an honorable man, upright and generous. Those thoughts could not be voiced outside the home. The family had to remain silent, and ashamed.” By making all this public, Carrère opened a rift with his mother. “For more than two years, there were very, very cold relations,” he told me. In time, they reconciled, he said, “but ‘reconciled’ means never talking about it.”

The same book describes the arc of a romance with a woman, referred to only as Sophie, who sometimes faults Carrère for what she registers as his privileged, careless ways. In Carrère’s assessment, she is not fully at home in his intellectual milieu; he recalls that, when she makes a note to herself to look up the great American novelist whose name she’s heard at dinner, she writes, “Read Solbello.” In the summer of 2002, he plans what he supposes is a gift to her. He has been asked to contribute a short story about travel to Le Monde; weeks in advance, he has arranged for his story to be published on the Saturday in July when he knows that Sophie will get on a train to join him at the oceanside village where his parents have a summer house. He writes a pornographic tale, “L’Usage du Monde.” The title, borrowed from a classic Swiss travel book, here means both “The Way of the World” and “Making Use of Le Monde.” The story is addressed to Sophie, and places her on that train, reading his story. On the train, you will do this, and you will do that. Carrère told me that he was perhaps encouraged in this project by the example of Nicholson Baker’s two sex-filled novels of the mid-nineties, “Vox” and “The Fermata.” (Carrère’s usual sexual subject matter is happy sex, in fantasy or in reality. Such passages can read like a reply, on behalf of all French charmers, to Houellebecq’s depictions of contemporary sexual ugliness. Bourgeois-Tacquet, speaking at lunch, said that sex gave Carrère a sense of being “close, close, close” to another person—“and that doesn’t happen very often in his life.”)

In “Russian Novel,” Carrère writes, “Only a man immune to superstition could plan his pleasure in such detail without fear of defying the gods.” Just before his story’s publication, Sophie tells him that she probably won’t be able to come that weekend. On the day the story appears, he searches a train bound for the coast but doesn’t find her. He does, however, find two reporters from Le Monde, looking for her.

Sophie never took the train, because she was arranging an abortion, after getting pregnant by another man. Le Monde’s ombudsman later questioned the paper’s decision to publish Carrère’s story.

In various ways, then, “L’Usage du Monde” was not a success. Carrère, reliving the episode five years later in “Russian Novel,” acknowledges feeling some embarrassment in front of the reporters—“the shame of a shy adolescent who invented girlfriends and then realized that no one believed him”—but he isn’t ready to disown the short story, and he notes that many readers praised it. His mother, in whose house he’s staying that weekend, says nothing. Carrère writes, “What she thinks of it is clear, but she’d rather be torn to pieces by wild horses than even mention it.”

Not long after this, Carrère and Sophie broke up. But first they flew to Corsica to vacation with Emmelene Landon and Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, her husband and Carrère’s beloved friend and publisher. (Otchakovsky-Laurens died in 2018.) Landon recently described Carrère and his girlfriend moving through the airport in sunglasses, smoking, like movie stars of an earlier age. They didn’t help much with housework. There was little discussion of “L’Usage du Monde.” Landon, laughing, said of the story, “I think that you have to do whatever you feel like—even if it’s the weirdest thing.”

Near the end of “Russian Novel,” Carrère refers, with relief, to having met Devynck, his future wife, in 2003, just before his forty-sixth birthday. In “Lives Other Than My Own,” the book he published next, she is a constant, stabilizing figure. He recalls, for example, a conversation that they had just before the death of Juliette, Devynck’s sister:

Only a few months ago, if I’d learned I had cancer and would soon die, if I’d asked myself the same question as Juliette—has my life been a success?—I could not have given the same answer. I’d have said no, I hadn’t made a success of my life. I’d have said I’d succeeded in some things, had two handsome sons who were alive and well, and had written three or four books that gave form to what I was. . . . But I had not learned how to love—or hadn’t been able to, which is the same thing. No one had been able to rest in complete confidence in my love and I would not rest, at the end, in anyone else’s. That’s what I’d have said at the news of my impending death, before the wave hit. And then, after the wave, I chose you, we chose each other, and now nothing’s the same. You’re here, close to me, and if I had to die tomorrow I could say like Juliette that my life has been a success.

“I know you’re really busy right now, but when you have a chance I’d love to pick your brain about how you got to where you are today.”
Cartoon by Suerynn Lee

Devynck is present, too, in “Limonov” and then in “The Kingdom” (2014), a beguiling account of the early decades of the Christian church and of Carrère’s religious impulses in adulthood, written partly in the form of notes for a historical novel that he’s been wise enough to leave unwritten. Carrère’s identification with St. Luke is explicit: “Luke really didn’t have a head for abstract ideas. He was interested in quarrels between real people with real names, people he knew.” As before, “The Kingdom” includes descriptions of Carrère’s family life: he refers to his daughter’s school, in Paris, and to a house that he and Devynck have bought on the Greek island of Patmos.

At the start of “Yoga,” Carrère briefly acknowledges that at the time of the silent retreat he was married. But he says no more, and he doesn’t name Devynck. We now know that they separated not long after he returned home, and eventually divorced. “Yoga” describes only the effect of the rupture—the wash from a boat that’s out of frame. He’s suddenly living alone, and “as lonely as a rat.” He doesn’t bathe. “I don’t stop trembling, objects fall from my hands. If I put jars of yogurt in the fridge, they slip and crash onto the kitchen floor.” And after a lifetime of psychological inquiry, including long periods of psychotherapy, he is surprised to receive a new diagnosis: bipolar II disorder. (As he notes, symptoms may include behavior that’s “seductive, flirtatious, very sexual, outwardly very much alive.”) When I asked Carrère if this had helped him understand earlier aspects of life—like, say, “L’Usage du Monde”—he smiled: “Yes. Performative pornography, involving my girlfriend, without telling her? And being sure that you are doing something wonderful?”

Carrère’s mental distress grows so severe that he enters Sainte-Anne, a psychiatric hospital in Paris, where doctors note suicidal ideations, among other disturbances. He is then given electroshock treatment and prescribed lithium—and the medication comes to help him, in a way that he finds confusing. As he put it to me, “It’s completely contrary to my philosophical attitude, which is that to improve oneself you have to work on it.” He is discharged from Sainte-Anne.

“Yoga” then takes a number of turns. Carrère describes volunteering with young migrants in a camp on the Greek island of Leros; he writes of the death of Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens. He then ends—as he has in previous books—on a moment of qualified good cheer. He has met an unnamed woman, whom it’s now possible to identify as Bourgeois-Tacquet: “Considering all the things that can be chalked up against me, I find life generous to give me another chance.”

Carrère wrote the bulk of “Yoga” in the second half of 2019, while he and Devynck were still negotiating their divorce. As we now know—but we don’t learn from “Yoga”—Devynck proposed that Carrère sign an agreement to leave her out of future books, except with her permission. This could be thought of as extending beyond the marriage one aspect of the marriage: Carrère had previously shown Devynck his drafts, and would not have published something over her objections.

A few years ago, when Carrère released a collection of his shorter nonfiction pieces, he included nine columns on matters of sex and love written, in 2003 and 2004, for an Italian magazine. In one, he described a dinner at which he introduced “Hélène,” then his new girlfriend, to an ex. He quotes Hélène saying afterward, “I like the fact that she likes you so much, and I think she’s sexy.” But, she went on, he seemed to be signalling to her his bona fides as an ex; he seemed impatient to get past the period of tempest and passion, and to “settle into a peaceful, loving friendship.” Hélène continued, “That’s not how it’s going to be with me. When it’s over, it’ll be over. When we no longer love each other, we’re not going to be friends.”

When Samuelson, the agent, saw Devynck’s proposed clause, he firmly advised Carrère not to sign. As he said to me, the facts of Carrère’s life “are the ingredients of his writing.”

Carrère signed. “I was wrong to do it,” he told me. But “I wanted to divorce, and my ex-wife told me that I had to sign it.”

They were divorced in March, 2020. Almost immediately, Carrère showed Devynck a draft of “Yoga.” That fall, she published an article, on the Web site of the French edition of Vanity Fair, to correct media “rumors and inaccuracies.” The article was critical of Carrère. She said that she’d had no idea he was writing about her even as he was making an agreement not to write about her. She quoted from a note that her ex-husband had sent along with the manuscript. “That I write autobiographical books should not be a surprise to you,” he wrote, adding that “Yoga” would be “incomprehensible if I said nothing about its context.” Devynck observed, “The context, in this case, was me.”

Devynck, who declined to give me an interview, had previously accepted that Carrère’s books would describe her life, often in intimate detail. But, as she recounted in her article, she now wanted to keep “unwelcome revelations about my personal life” out of print—and she certainly didn’t want to be included in what she described as a scene of sexual fantasy. The draft hadn’t made Devynck a central character, but she was in there. Using a yellow highlighter, she marked every reference to herself in the manuscript—all were to be deleted. Later that year, on Instagram, she posted a screenshot of a few sentences by Serge Doubrovsky, the French writer, describing how his autobiographical novels had made use of the women in his life: “I fed on their flesh. . . . I am a devouring, greedy monster, an eternal suckling infant.” (Devynck has written a book, to be published in September, that will be, in part, about this recent history.)

In the matter of the breakup, “I think we were responsible—both,” Carrère told me. The split should have been disclosed in “Yoga,” he said, “even very lightly, very simply, without any accusation.” (In Carrère’s opinion, Devynck’s public remarks have given him license to say a little more about the relationship’s end than he did in the book.) Carrère had imagined that they would negotiate over “Yoga.” “I thought she would say, ‘This I would like you to remove, this I would like you to change,’ ” he told me. “I would have agreed to everything.” He added, “I thought there would be a normal talk, not this incredible thing to say—‘I must not exist in your book.’ ”

Carrère and his publisher protested. Carrère recalled telling Devynck that he wanted to acknowledge her generosity of spirit: she’d held his hand at Sainte-Anne even as their relationship was dissolving. Close to tears, he told me, “I want never to forget that we were really happy, that she was a wonderful woman, that I loved her because she was lovable. And that I even showed the best of what I can be.”

In the first weeks of the pandemic, in the apartment over the grocery store, Carrère attempted a rewrite that was highly fictionalized, prefaced by an “Any resemblance to . . .” clause of deniability. Ten pages in, he stopped. His book, he decided, would have to exist with some holes. As he noted in “The Kingdom,” his usual instinct as a writer had been to seek narrative orderliness—to “always connect one sentence with the next, always look for a smooth transition.” Now he tried to take some encouragement from the novelist Georges Perec’s formal experiments with narrative gaps and omissions. “I never experienced such an uncomfortable situation,” Carrère told me. “Honestly, it’s a flaw of the book. Well—this flaw, it’s part of its identity.” He mimed a limp.

He cheated, or at least tested Devynck’s readiness to sue, by quoting a few hundred words about his marriage from “Lives Other Than My Own”—the “my life has been a success” paragraph. He also added a new chapter headed “The place where you don’t lie.” He wrote, “Each book imposes its own rules, rules we don’t set in advance, but rather discover with use. I can’t say of this book what I’ve proudly said of several others: ‘It’s all true.’ While writing it, I have to distort a little, transpose a little, erase a little. Especially erase, because while I can say whatever I want about myself, including less flattering truths, I can’t do the same with others.”

Carrère’s admirers, at home, have sometimes described his work as “autofiction”—a tag, coined by Serge Doubrovsky in the seventies, that has a firmer footing in France than in the United States, and describes work that could reasonably be thought of as memoir but for one reason or another is published as fiction, and has permission to toy with the truth. When that word is applied to Carrère, who has written that his “first rule is not to lie,” it sounds a little perverse. But it’s meant respectfully: in a publishing and bookselling culture that rarely refers to “nonfiction”—rather, there’s literature, and then everything else, in subject categories—“autofiction” helps to ratify a work’s literary intent, and keeps it at the front of the bookstore. Laurent Demanze, an academic who has made a specialty of Carrère’s work, explained, in a recent e-mail, that in France “many writers have a second profession: the profession of journalist is one of them.”

Carrère is largely unimpressed by critical hand-wringing about the ineffable uncertainties at the border of fiction and nonfiction. He has proposed that the line between the categories is “perfectly clear.” When he says that he’s trying hard to tell the truth, he means it. It’s relevant to him that he uses real names. (Sophie is Sophie.) He described it to me as a “point of honor” that in France he has never categorized his nonfiction books as novels. (“Limonov” was published as a novel in the U.K.)

But “Yoga” does exist at a blurry border. Carrère left things out and made things up. He cut the marital breakup that tipped him into madness. (When I put it to him in those terms, he replied, “I can’t say more, but that’s right.”) One of his sisters agreed to stand in for Devynck as the figure in “Yoga” who makes an appointment for him at Sainte-Anne.

And there are fictional aspects of “Yoga” that aren’t explained by the Devynck lacuna. The book vividly describes one of Carrère’s fellow-volunteers in Leros—an American woman who’s a little lost and pitiable, like the fake victim of the 2015 attacks. Carrère then notes that she’s “a partly fictional character.”

Soon after, he brings the story of his affair with the “Gemini woman” to a close. According to “Yoga,” the affair had begun in a Swiss hotel, without a word being said, after a yoga vacation that both had attended; it had continued on later occasions—but still without the participants fully introducing themselves—in a hotel somewhere in provincial France. We then read that, three years after they last met, he’s in an airport terminal in the Azores, failing to enjoy a Cormac McCarthy novel. He looks up and sees the Gemini woman, and has no doubt that she’s seen him. “What would happen if I got up, walked over to her, and took her by the hand?” he writes. “Would we walk out of the terminal together, the way we once walked out of the Gare de Genève-Cornavin, head over to one of the Sheraton or Sofitel hotels you can find at any airport, ask for a room at the front desk, go up together in one of the lifts, without a word, lock ourselves in that room of ours, and go under the radar for a few hours? I don’t know. What I’m certain of, though, is that the scenario that’s running through my head is also running through hers, and that she knows full well that it’s also running through mine. And the knowledge that I have unlimited access to her thoughts and fantasies, and she to mine, makes the situation extraordinarily erotic.”

This reads like fiction, and a little like “L’Usage du Monde.” I asked Carrère, as politely as possible, if this perhaps hadn’t happened.

He was sitting at one end of a deep, pale sofa in his living room. He said, “Uhh,” and pulled the corners of his mouth down in a grimace. Then, laughing: “I confess there is a small bit of fiction. This is a bit arranged.” (The French edition at one point notes that the Gemini woman is part fictional, although without drawing attention to the airport scene. Carrère cut this warning in the English translation.)

Had he seen someone in the airport who looked like his former lover, and taken things from there? Yes, he said.

Devynck, in her article, protested that “Yoga” had misled readers, not least in the scenes set in Leros. In her view, Carrère implied that he had volunteered there for weeks, whereas he’d actually been there only a few days, some of them with her. She also noted that his Leros experience had occurred before he was hospitalized; “Yoga” implies that it was afterward. Carrère had allowed the Greek-island interlude to become, she said, part of his story of an “exit from depression, a return to life.” Such shaping (which was present even in the first version of the book she saw) was an ethical breach, she proposed: Carrère had lied.

This perhaps goes too far. “Yoga” is imprecise about chronology. Besides, it has its “distort a little” warning. “Yoga” is not wrong, nor is it bad. But it’s not quite Carrère’s best, and readers may feel let down by his new embrace of half-truths. Carrère resembles someone who, upon being invited to loosen his tie, takes off all his clothes. One of the appeals of Carrère’s writing—especially in his ruminations about St. Luke and St. Paul in “The Kingdom”—is how he frames passages of speculation or fantasy in a way that leaves readers feeling secure in their understanding of what is not speculation. This narrative control extends to his management of time. Indeed, as he writes in “Lives Other Than My Own,” referring to the nonlinear conversational style of Étienne Rigal, the judge, “I, on the other hand, care intensely about chronology. I find ellipsis acceptable only as a rhetorical device, duly rationed and controlled by me, otherwise I can’t stand it. Perhaps because there are snags in the fabric of my life (which I try to repair by keeping the weave as tight as possible), I need to establish markers—such as ‘the previous Tuesday,’ ‘the next night,’ ‘three weeks earlier.’ ” In a recent e-mail, Arnaud Viviant, a leading French critic, described his reaction to “Yoga” ’s fiction-making. “I saw myself detaching from the story,” he wrote. “Suddenly, Carrère no longer appeared to me as a super journalist-writer, but as a half-novelist playing a journalist.”

I asked Carrère why he didn’t tell the truth in the airport scene. He thought for a moment, said, “Because . . .,” then paused again. “I thought it would have spoiled it a little.” What he liked about the story of the Gemini woman was that, this final scene aside, he had been describing something real that sounded fictional: an extended sexual relationship that remained essentially anonymous, with communication of one kind and not the other.

He wanted “homogeneity,” he said. That is: to avoid disrupting a narrative of real events that had a novelistic, or filmic, texture, he had added fiction. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time in works of autofiction.

Cartoon by Mick Stevens

Carrère went on, “Because of all this thing with Hélène, it had a very strange status, all of it. So it’s a bit confusing. Not just for the reader but for me, too.”

The jury of the prestigious Prix Goncourt has a clear preference for fiction, and Devynck’s article accused Carrère of trying to boost his chance of winning the prize by including fictional elements. Carrère denies this, and he described to me how he had resisted a suggestion from his publisher to call “Yoga” a novel: “They said, ‘It’s not a big effort, and it would make things very different.’ ” In September, 2020, “Yoga” did make it onto the Prix Goncourt’s initial longlist. After Devynck’s article appeared, later that month, the book was not on the final shortlist.

Bourgeois-Tacquet, speaking at home one morning when Carrère was out, observed that he had never experienced heartache or profound grief. Now that his extremes of mood have been smoothed out by medication, he’s left with an equanimity about everyday things, which she described as an almost prelapsarian state. “I have something very important to tell you,” she said. “And I keep saying it to my friends, and to his friends. Emmanuel is the happiest person I know. I’m not joking! I have never met anyone who is like this. He’s always happy. I don’t mean heureux—I mean content. He’s O.K. Everywhere is fine. I’m never happy. Everything is a problem for me. For him, everything is O.K. He doesn’t care. It’s raining, it’s O.K. It’s sunny, it’s O.K. He’s sick, he’s happy to be sick. I’m sick and I want to kill everyone.”

He was aware of a deficit in natural empathy, she added, “so he compensates—in everyday life, he’s very attentive, more than other men I’ve been with.” It was lovely to live with him. But, after a moment’s hesitation, she went on to describe the gift that Carrère had given her on her thirty-fifth birthday, and the arguments that had followed. This was before they moved in together.

His birthday present, he had explained in a letter, was an idea for a movie that she could write and direct. The letter had sketched out a film treatment. “I had never asked him to give me an idea,” she said. “I don’t need an idea. And that’s not a present. He really thought it was generous.” She added that his proposed screenplay—about a sexual relationship conducted remotely—was an elaboration on one she’d already mentioned to him, months earlier.

A few hours after visiting with Bourgeois-Tacquet, I met Carrère at Le Napoléon, a café within view of his old apartment above the grocery. His former home with Devynck—with whom he is still on poor terms—is around the corner.

We sat at a table on a busy sidewalk. Carrère, who hadn’t had a drink in a few years, ordered an orange juice, and described how, not long after the events related in “Yoga,” he had “the most simple, the most obvious, and the most promising idea for a book I ever had—I thought that it was impossible not to make a great book with such an idea.” He laughed. The idea was to talk to people around him.

He would start conversations with those living and working within about a thousand feet of where we were sitting: “I know nothing about them. And I am not that interested. And I think it’s bad not to be interested. I think, even, it’s wrong.” He mentioned a waiter, then working at Le Napoléon, with whom he sometimes briefly chatted about books: “I see him every day. I like him, I think he likes me. But I know nothing of him.” Carrère’s feeling at the time, he said, was that “you don’t have to choose either to make a good piece of art or to improve the quality of your relationships with other people. The idea was to work on both.” His provisional title was “Proximité.” When Carrère wrote a memo about the project, for himself and for Samuelson, he recalled the diner scene in “Groundhog Day” in which Bill Murray astonishes Andie MacDowell by giving her intimate biographies of those around them. (“This is Bill. . . . He likes the town, he paints toy soldiers, and he’s gay.”) That was the dream of “Proximité,” he wrote: to generate that astonishment. He added, “But, yes, of course I’ll talk about myself.”

He interviewed a hundred people: the waiter; barbers serving West African-born customers; the owners of a fancy bakery with customers like Carrère; homeless people. He wrote hundreds of thousands of words.

He put it all aside to finish “Yoga.” Later, in 2020, he “opened the file and reread the whole thing,” he said. “It was bad. Really bad. Really uninteresting. I closed the file.” He might open it again in a couple of years.

Carrère gave me a little tour of the neighborhood. The stores were closing for the day, and the bars were starting to fill. In Passage Brady, an arcade that’s a little like the one where he now lives, Indian restaurants were waiting for customers. As we walked past one of them, a young waiter made eye contact with Carrère, and the two men said hello. But there was a misalignment: although they’d spoken, occasionally, at a different restaurant, the waiter clearly didn’t remember him, and was greeting him only as a customer. There was a moment of awkwardness, from which the men smilingly extracted themselves.

As we walked on, Carrère said that, for the sake of the article I was writing, it would have been nice if I’d heard people yelling out, at every corner, “Hey, Emmanuel!” He went on, “There are people who know everybody. I would like to be that person, and I’m not.”

Early this year, the Russian theatre and film director Kirill Serebrennikov—who spent some two years under house arrest on charges of embezzlement that are widely thought to have been trumped up, for political reasons—began filming an English-language adaptation of Carrère’s study of Eduard Limonov, who died in 2020. Carrère had agreed to take a small acting role in the movie, which would star Ben Whishaw. And, because Carrère’s personal calendar seems to synchronize with catastrophic world events, his brief trip to Moscow was scheduled to start on February 24th. François Samuelson would join him.

In a video interview published on February 23rd, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was asked if Russia would invade Ukraine. She has met Vladimir Putin a number of times, and the French political establishment has long paid attention to her views, which have largely shown support for, or acceptance of, Putin’s policy decisions, including the annexation of Crimea. No, she told her interviewer: Putin was “not an idiot.” Early the next morning, Putin invaded Ukraine. Emmanuel Carrère was at home, waiting for a taxi to the airport, when Samuelson called to say, “I think we can’t go.” Carrère said that he was probably right.

But then he felt bad; he’d let the film down. The next day, he flew to Moscow alone. He shot his scene. By now, Ukrainian forces were fighting to retain control of Kharkiv, where Limonov had spent much of his youth. When Carrère’s return flight was cancelled, the film company found him a flight to Dubai. He headed to the airport in a taxi, then asked the driver to turn around. When Bourgeois-Tacquet asked him why he’d decided to stay, he answered, “I’m a journalist.” Her reply was not facetious: “O.K., I didn’t know.” He later mentioned to her that, after the years of abstaining, he’d had a few drinks.

When I called Carrère in Moscow, he’d been there ten days. The Limonov film, he said, was being moved to Bulgaria. He had learned how to use Telegram, the encrypted-communication app. He had spent the week largely with middle-class people of his generation. They were either preparing to leave or imagining a new life under conditions that were bound to fascinate Carrère—they would be cut off from the rest of the world. When we spoke, he was writing a piece about Moscow for L’Obs; when it was done, he’d fly home, via Istanbul.

The article, published a few days later, began with a sketch of a woman whom he called Irina. “The only thing that reassures me is that our country is very big,” she told Carrère. “There are places to hide. Magadan, Baikal, Altai. . . . I do boating, you know, my friends and I have a small boat, which is moored fifty kilometres from Moscow. My dream was a long trip to Africa, by rivers and by sea. We had prepared everything, I was going to take a year off, leave next summer. Maybe, instead, I’ll go with my daughter to the Arctic Ocean. Maybe we’ll live by the Arctic Ocean. Maybe we’ll learn to live differently. Maybe it will be good.” ♦