One morning I reported for work at the Louvre with my decorator friends. Philosophy had conceived the idea. Wanting to give them something to chew on but not knowing whether they really had teeth, I took their painting and hid it in my smock. In the twentieth century it fell to the advertisement to consolidate their rhetoric; now it’s up to me. In the twinkling of an eye, several minutes passed without awakening the slightest suspicion — that my abduction, for example, was a lasting symbol, conveyancing a modernist movement. Later I returned to the room where La Joconde was to be found. Looking lost, I left the frame there. It is older than the wrecks among which it sits; like the vampire, it has been dead many times, and learned to keep the secrets of the grave. Henceforth I was to be clear in my decisions: the painting would be of a light-fingered man who at once reassembled Apollinaire. It would ruin him for all other women. It would stand for the embodiment of fancy, and would ponder, as only a clod could do, the meaning of life, which is forty-two — just as it ought to do.