Free Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord Page A

finished Hector had a lump in his throat.
    ‘My mother’s never got over it,’ she explained. ‘I think she’s still depressed.’
    And, looking at Marie-Louise’s mother sitting silently at one end of the table, Hector could see very well that it was true.
    Hector and Marie-Louise began to discuss pills and psychotherapy. Marie-Louise had tried absolutely everything, including taking her mother to be treated in the big country where she worked that had so many psychiatrists, but her mother had never really come back to life. Because there are some tragedies in life which psychiatry can help, but not cure.
    Marie-Louise’s sister’s husband, Nestor, was quite an amusing sort who enjoyed joking with Hector, and was in business. At first, Hector was worried that he might be in the same business as Eduardo, but he wasn’t. Nestor imported cars and exported paintings by local artists (painting was the other excellent thing in this country besides beer). He also owned a factory where people made shoes so that people in Hector’s country could go jogging. (Looking at Nestor, Hector thought that there were certainly Charleses of every hue in this world.) Hector asked him whether this helped people here to become less poor. Nestor said that it helped a little, but that it would take hundreds like him.
    ‘The problem is that this country is unstable. And so businessmen don’t want to risk their money here, there’s no investment, and therefore no jobs. People talk about globalisation, but the problem is that we’re not part of it!’
    Hector understood that, contrary to what some people in his country believed, globalisation wasn’t always a bad thing.
    Marie-Louise’s husband wasn’t there. He’d been born in this country, but worked as an engineer now in the big country that had so many psychiatrists, which wasn’t much help to his country, except that he sent money to his family who were still here. This was all because Marie-Louise didn’t want her children to have to go to school with a bodyguard.
    Hector had a question he wanted to ask about children. Why did the children he’d seen in the city smile all the time, even though they lived in the street and had nothing, no shoes, and often no parents to look after them? The grown-ups didn’t smile, which was understandable given the lives they had. But why did the little children seem happy?
    Everybody thought the question was very interesting. They came up with lots of answers.
    ‘Because they don’t yet fully realise their situation, they can’t make comparisons.’
    This reminded Hector of lesson no. 1.
    ‘Because children who are sad die more quickly, so we don’t see them. Only happy children survive.’
    ‘Because they were pleased to see Hector.’
    Everybody burst out laughing, and Marie-Louise told Hector that this proved it was true!
    And then one of the cousins (she was rather too pretty, so Hector had been careful not to look at her too much) said, ‘Because they know that people will be kinder to a child who smiles.’
    Everybody thought that this was the best explanation, and Marie-Louise’s cousin looked at Hector and smiled, and he wondered whether it wasn’t because she wanted him to be nice to her, but fortunately the whole family was there to stop them from getting up to any mischief.
    This question of children smiling reminded Hector of the story of one of his fellow psychiatrists. When he was a child, people from another country had occupied Hector’s country and had decided to put to death all the people with surnames they didn’t like. In order to do this they put them on trains and took them very far away, to places where nobody could see them doing this terrible thing. Hector’s colleague was a child with the wrong sort of surname, and he’d been kept in a camp with other children waiting for the train that would take them to their deaths. But because he was a child who smiled and made everybody laugh, including the people