Plume at the Restaurant

Monsieur Plume is quietly having a bite of lunch at a nice restaurant, when people in authority – starting with the head waiter and escalating, grotesquely, to the chief of police – accuse him of some kind of wrongdoing that he can’t quite understand, but for which he nonetheless feels excruciatingly guilty. He strains to apologize, to explain, to say the correct words to appease his persecutors – but to no avail.

The story is “Plume at the Restaurant”, written in 1930 by the Belgian/French writer, poet, and artist Henri Michaux. It's one of a series of little episodes by Michaux in which an ordinary situation twists itself into a nightmare of alienation, with Monsieur Plume hanging on, pretending to the desperate last that everything is perfectly normal.

From a translation by David Ball.