Two young couples living at the extremes of Parisian society and suburbia. On the margins, Jeanne,
cashier, and Jo, temp...in the middle, Onyx, charming intellectual from the Latin Quarter and her lover to.J., exiled engineer to Shanghai. Jeanne's madness, Jo's rascality, Onyx's vanity and to.J.'s conformity will cause their lives to intersect. Witnessing their passions and their despair are two all-dividing people: a famous Jewish lawyer and Jeanne's mother, a southerner whose claim to her origins has made her hostile to any form of diversity. It will all force wealthy Parisians to to take an interest in the precarious suburbanites.

NOVEMBER 28, 1987. Wappingers Falls, New York State, USA. Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old black teenager, is found behind a house, curled up in a fetal position in a plastic bag, her hair shredded, covered in excrement and racist writing made with charcoal and markers ("Negra," "KKK"). The young woman accuses six white men, including a police officer, of abducting her, kidnapping her for four days and raping her.

JULY 9, 2004. Between Louvres and Sarcelles, Val d'Oise, France. Marie-Léonie Leblanc, 23, files a complaint with the Aubervilliers police station against six young black and Maghrebi men who violently assaulted her while she was traveling that morning with her 13-month-old baby girl in the RER. On that train, without the passengers reacting, the six attackers raped the girl, whom they believed to be Jewish, cut her hair with a knife, tore off her clothes and drew hooked crosses
on her belly with a marker.

I was living to New York, in the middle of Manhattan's bo-bo (bourgeois-bohemian) neighborhood, the Upper West Side, when the Tawana Brawley case broke out. Equally, the summer when the "Marie L." case made headlines, I had just returned to live to Paris, in an apartment near the Hôtel de Ville. Two lost teenage girls, two mythomaniacs, were entering by force into the collective imagination by denouncing invented racist or anti-Semitic crimes. These two troubled women, coming out of the suburbs, were brutally breaking into my comfortable life as a well-adjusted writer in the center of the city. Without their gesture, I certainly would never have crossed paths with the trajectory of these fragile and desperate lives -- in a drug-ravaged ghetto in Tawana's case, a dead-end existence in Marie-Léonie's case. The similarities of the two cases struck me : for both, a desperate need for love ("affective deficit," they call it). Identical circumstances. Mother remarried. Dreaded father. Boyfriend about to leave them. Stunning symmetry of narratives : six white men against one black woman, six "colored" men against one white woman. Same solution to get by "with dignity."
A lie that triggers immense consequences, and was judged "disproportionate" to the problems that were at the root of it. But was this really the case? And who can determine the weight of unhappiness?

AUGUST 15, 1895. Rome. Italy.
La Tribuna reports the attempted suicide, in a small boarding house, of a young 20-year-old governess, Adelaide Bernardini, fatherless and motherless, a teacher for three years in Italian schools in Turkey. Two days later, the Inspector General of Schools Abroad published a denial: the young woman was never a member of the teaching staff. Intrigued by the newspaper article, writer Luigi Capuana, thirty years older than Adelaide, finds her, welcomes her home, and marries her.

NOVEMBER 14, 1922. Quirino Theater. Rome. Italy.
Creation of Luigi Pirandello's play, Vestire gli ignudi, inspired by the story of Ada and Luigi Capuana, which was a great success. In this play about a lie unveiled, the young governess Ersilia expects the novelist Ludovico to cooperate with her imaginary projection of an embellished past. Ersilia was nothing. She lied to finally be something. The lie allows her to meet a journalist, and then the novelist. Pirandello captures the spirit of the modern age, this
"society of the spectacle" where one will end up not existing except in the "quarter-hour of celebrity" that Wahrol spoke of.

I did not imitate Luigi Capuana, who to fifty years old saw one last opportunity for lifeblood in his encounter with Ada, with whom the writer had come into contact thanks to the young woman's lie. I did as Pirandello did: I did not immerse myself in real life, I just carved out a role for myself as a lurking observer, the character of the lawyer in "RER."
The cry for help of these three women struck me. Being white, I have never been a victim of racism.
Not being Jewish, I have not been a victim of anti-Semitism. Being a man, I was not a victim of sexual exploitation. By contrast, when I was younger, I had to suffer homophobia.
One had to write, to tell about these intersections, this unexpected crossing, these amazing collisions. Finally, Tawana and Marie-Léonie succeeded. Certainly not as they had hoped. Their lie did not help to escape their social fate. But they tore away the veil that prevented us from seeing their little lives, those lives that could be called on hold, however hard they to exist, however much they do not matter. They have opened a gash in the ground, wide open, allowing a glimpse into the bowels of the earth, beneath the pavement of the rue Saint Honoré or that of Central Park West, of the toil of living, whizzing through the crowded trains, at rush hour, in the RER that crisscrosses the city from part to part, from east to west, or from north to south, or on the to line of the New York City subway that carries its human cargo from the ghettos of the Hudson to the offices of
downtown Manhattan and the garages of Brooklyn. Like a cross-section of the third-class holds of those great ships that made the from Smyrna crossing to Brindisi.

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