Free The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain

burn?’
    â€˜Why do you want to burn your clothes?’
    â€˜Because … I need to.’
    After handing over a 50-franc note and emptying his pockets, Pierre put his jacket on top of the wood. He was reminded of the Hindu ritual of burning bodies on a pyre until they were reduced to cinders.
    The jacket was enveloped in smoke, which became denser and, as the first burning branches caught the material, the fire took hold. The gardener watched his strange visitor in between his spadefuls of dead leaves.Pierre removed his hat and held it in both hands at knee-height while he watched the flames do their work on the coat he’d worn for six winters.
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    When he returned to his flat, he opened the bedroom wardrobe looking for his black Yves Saint Laurent suit, but he couldn’t find it. He had probably given it away with the others to the Salvation Army. But he found another suit, a charcoal-grey Lanvin, that seemed to have survived the great purge. Perhaps Esther had kept it, without telling him.
    On one of the high shelves he discovered a white shirt he hadn’t worn for years. And in his chest of drawers he found gold and mother-of-pearl cuff links. Pierre undressed, throwing his jeans onto the velvet armchair in a ball, and put on the suit trousers, the shirt and then the jacket. It took him a minute to wrestle the cuff links in. He looked at himself in the mirror on the inside door of the wardrobe, beardless in a suit and white shirt. The suit was a little tight at the waist but it didn’t matter.
    He closed the wardrobe door, walked through the apartment, put on his hat and went out.

 
    Could he do it? It was so many years since he had undertaken this exercise. The last time, in spring 1982, he had tried it during a walk from the entrance of the Tuileries to the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, all the way through the gardens from west to east until he arrived in front of the Louvre.
    He had then sat on a bench in the little square where several years later they would erect a glass and steel pyramid and thought, I’m finished. I couldn’t identify at least a quarter of the perfumes I passed.
    The challenge he now set himself had been a spur- of-the -moment decision. But he felt up to it. He was going to identify the perfumes of all the people he walked past in the street. Pierre breathed deeply then closed his eyes.
    He counted backwards like a hypnotist bringing his subject back to reality: five, four, three, two … one, then he clicked his fingers and opened his eyes, stroked the brim of his hat and began to walk in a straight line. The rule of the exercise was that he mustn’t stop or turn his head. Adark-haired woman with a bob was coming towards him in a black suit and Emmanuelle Khanh glasses. She was level with him and now she’d passed him. One second, two: the little gust of air that accompanied all movement swept over Pierre; ‘Fidji,’ he murmured.
    Without slowing down at all, he waited for the man with the briefcase to pass him. The man wore a grey-checked suit and his hair was tied back in a ponytail. The two regulation seconds preceded the olfactory waft; Paco Rabanne pour Homme.
    Now there was a group of three women in their thirties coming towards him. According to his self-imposed rules, although he wasn’t allowed to stop or turn to look at anyone, he could cut across them.
    â€˜Oh, excuse me,’ he said as he forced them to separate to get past him.
    He brushed lightly against the one with mid-length brown hair (First by Van Cleef & Arpels), her friend’s long blonde ponytail skimmed his jacket (L’Air du Temps) and as he passed the third, a petite blonde with short hair (Eau de Rochas), he heard her murmur, ‘He’s crazy, that man.’
    Hat-trick, thought Pierre just as a young woman in jeans and a red beret hurried towards him; Poison.
    A man in velvet trousers and a suede jacket walked diagonally in front of him cleaning