A strong shadow appeared in her stead – a tall, dark-haired, extremely beautiful woman…

“I protest”, she said at once. “I have been made known by my enemy, that silly, insignificant woman devoid of any true identity, who is never even given a name. She is a non-entity, a signifier with no substantial signified. Mostly lost in sterile day-dreaming, she keeps imagining what others might be saying or thinking and what might happen but this envisioning activity does not lead to creation: she is a failed artist, talking about drawing but never performing any. She is a very unreliable narrator: she disguises the truth while pretending to reveal it. And she is accomplice to murder, marrying a man old enough to be her father, glad to learn that he had murdered his first wife: a victim of the syndrome “suddenly he loves me and everything is fine” and a bad case of the Electra complex, if you ask me. And I, Rebecca, I am the absent presence, whose posthumous voice has not been quite silenced by murder; my silent voice reaches the reader through other characters. I have been ruthlessly misrepresented, just like Lilith – Adam’s first wife – who rebelled against his attempted domination: “I will not lie below, for the two of us are equal, since we are both from the earth.”

I was flabbergasted. Couldn’t believe the way she spoke. I asked her about Max de Winter, of course. I had a suspicion that he was far from being the victim the narrator made of him.

“You bet, she exclaimed. “He definitely is a kind of Bluebeard.  The “moral” at the end of Bluebeard’s tale explains how it always proves very costly for women to give in to curiosity, leaving no doubt as to the justification of this long chain of murdered wives. But what about the first woman in this bloody chain? What was the pretext to kill her? Literally, the text before the text? I am Bluebeard’s first wife – and he murdered me because I had slept with a woman. You remember Max de Winter saying: “She was not even normal”.  I am the real author of Bluebeard, for I told the whole true story to Perrault and he wrote it down as a fairy tale”.

She was dissolving. For the first time, I saw she was made of paper – confetti… Her parting words were truly humbling:

“I don’t exist. I never existed. I am a mere character, converted into author through accident. But so are you! By the way, stop procrastinating and finish this novel of yours before the beginning of WWIII!”

I did exactly the opposite. Setting my novel aside, I wrote the whole episode, called it a novella and found a publisher for it, a dear old man with a sweet smile and grey hair and a long beard. I remember wondering on our first meeting about the touch of blue in his beard, but I was too eager to tell him everything – at least what did not seem too berserk – and the most important thing, that I was a character, really. He shrugged his shoulders (I think that he has some French origins).

“You wish!” he said.