Free Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord

bit before dinner. That evening he was going to the house of Marie-Louise, the fellow psychiatrist he’d met on the plane who’d invited him to meet her family.
    His room was very nice if you like that sort of thing, with marble flooring and furniture of the kind you’d find at a château, except newer, and a red bathtub with gilt taps. Hector was resting on the bed when the telephone rang.
    It was Clara. Hector had left her a message during the day, because she’d been in a meeting.
    ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ she asked Hector.
    This made Hector feel bad because it was the same question Édouard had whispered in his ear when he was speaking to Ying Li for the first time in the bar with soft lighting.
    ‘Yes, it’s very interesting.’
    But at the same time, Hector felt awkward because of course he couldn’t tell her the most interesting thing. This was the first time he really felt that he was deceiving Clara.
    ‘And how about you? How are things at work?’
    ‘Oh, not bad, we had a good meeting.’
    Clara explained that the name she’d chosen for the new pill had been approved by the directors. It was a triumph for her. Hector congratulated her.
    It was all a bit flat. They continued to talk but as if they didn’t really have anything important or exciting to say and were just being polite. Finally they said goodbye and sent each other a kiss.
    Hector fell back on the bed, and his head started to swim.
    He’d just understood why he couldn’t forget Ying Li.
    It wasn’t because she was very pretty, since Clara was pretty too. (Hector had often had pretty girlfriends — perhaps because he wasn’t very happy with his own physique and so he felt that being with a pretty girlfriend balanced that out.)
    It wasn’t because he’d done with Ying Li what people in love do and it had been very intense, because frankly Hector had enough experience of that sort of thing not to fall in love so easily.
    No, he was remembering the moment when he’d really fallen in love with Ying Li.
    Perhaps you worked it out before he did, because, in matters of love, psychiatrists aren’t necessarily more intelligent than anyone else.
    It was when Ying Li came out of the bathroom all happy and then suddenly became sad, when she understood that Hector had just understood.
    It was when they had dinner together and Hector sensed that she was intimidated.
    It was when she cried in his arms.
    It was each time she was moved when she was with him.
    Hector had fallen in love with Ying Li’s emotions, and that was a very profound feeling indeed.

HECTOR LEARNS WHY CHILDREN SMILE
    ‘H ELP yourself to some more goat and sweet potato stew,’ said Marie-Louise.
    And Hector did because it was very good. No wonder the wolf was so keen to eat the goat in Aesop’s fable, he said to himself.
    There were a lot of people at the table: Marie-Louise’s mother, a tall, rather mournful lady; Marie-Louise’s sister and her husband; one of Marie-Louise’s younger brothers, and various cousins and friends, he wasn’t quite sure. The funny thing was that none of them were the same colour: Marie-Louise’s mother’s skin looked like Hector’s when he was tanned, her sister was darker, and the cousins were all different, the younger brother was dark like Marcel, and they were all extremely nice to Hector. On a sideboard stood a photograph of a handsome man in a smart suit. It was Marie-Louise’s father. She had told Hector that he had been a lawyer, and that many years ago, when the bad people were in power, as they usually were in this country, he had wanted to get into politics. One morning, when Marie-Louise was still a little girl, he had kissed her goodbye and left for the office, and in the evening a truck had dumped him in front of the house and driven away quickly. Her father was dead and had been badly beaten. Politics was often like that in this country. Marie-Louise seemed used to telling the story after all that time, but after she’d