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The idea of standing at a particular point on this planet is the result of various assumptions and abstract constructs. Alongside the geographical location is always an emotional position, which the individual experiences in a number of ways and which can occasionally lead to some confusion – primarily because this felt position is not based on the degree of latitude or longitude and often ignores celestial directions. Maille knew from Marie, the first secretary of the Lemusan secret service, that she had always had to imagine Paris at an angle of 180 degrees – and, as such, with Montmarte in the south of the city. He would have dearly liked to have made an attempt to adjust her inner compass at every place, and preferably over two dozen carefully north-faced Gillardeau oysters.

There was often such a severe conflict in Maille's head between his knowledge of the geographical position and his emotional experience of being in a particular place that he felt as though he was in two different places at the same time. His frequent travels had created in his imagination a world that had little in common with the globe in geography class: his world was certainly not entirely round; rather it stuck out from the cosmos like a breast or like an English Christmas pudding – from a universe that for him was nothing more than an opaque soup or a high-spirited assertion.

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