Free The Most Beautiful Book in the World by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

had never happened. Odile’s main concern at present was to renew her enrollment at the university but, no doubt because they had people filling in for the summer, she was unable to reach the right person for her re-enrollment. This was extremely irritating.
    She really wanted to devote herself to her studies, now. When she wasn’t resting in front of the twenty-four-hour news channel, she spent hours at work, reading books about the Middle East, working on her languages, and she seriously intended to finish her dissertation; she’d already started the introduction.
    Her dissertation advisor could not be reached. It seemed as if this climatic catastrophe was annihilating the entire country. Nothing functioned normally anymore. Her parents did not answer the phone, either. Everyone must have fled to find a cool spot somewhere.
    Well, let’s make the most of it and get down to essentials, thought Odile, who spent diligent hours perfecting the structure of her paragraphs or the flow of her sentences. I’ll give myself a week to finish this introduction.
    She found it so fascinating that she forgot to drink as much as she should. Moreover, her air-conditioning was beginning to malfunction: although she would set the thermostat on 20 degrees, later, after suffering for several hours, she would find it on 30 degrees or 32 or even 15! After a disagreeable search, she located the operating instructions and the warranty, and sent for the technician to come and repair it. He spent half a day working on it and said he didn’t understand, maybe there was a bad connection, in any event all the parts had been carefully checked and now it should all work perfectly. And yet the very next morning the meter in each room showed a complete and utterly absurd range of temperatures.
    There was no need to call the repairman again because Odile had figured out the origin of the malfunctioning thermostat: the intruder. No doubt the old woman found it delightfully entertaining to modify Odile’s settings behind her back.
    It did not take long for Odile to begin to feel exhausted—the work, the heat, the way she would forget to drink—so she decided to keep a watch out for the intruder, to catch her red-handed and settle the score once and for all.
    When she was certain that she was alone, she huddled in the broom closet, switched off the light, and waited in ambush.
    How long was she on watch? Impossible to say. You’d have thought the old woman had guessed Odile was waiting for her . . . After a few hours, with a raging thirst, she emerged from the closet and went back to the living room. There, God knows why, she had a sudden urge for a glass of pastis, so she opened the bar, poured herself a drink and, after one swallow, something very odd caught her eye.
    There was a book on the shelf that bore her name: Odile Versini, inscribed on the spine. After she pulled it from the shelf, she stood there completely baffled by the cover: this was her dissertation, the dissertation she was in the process of writing. And here it was in full—finished, printed on four hundred pages, published by a prestigious house she could never have dreamed of approaching.
    Who was playing these practical jokes on her?
    She leafed through the opening pages and went pale. Here were the premises of her introduction—the one she’d been slaving over for days—but it was finished, better written, with far greater mastery.
    What was going on?
    On raising her eyes, she saw the intruder. The old lady was looking her up and down, quite calmly.
    No. This time, enough was enough.
    She hurried back the way she had come, to the broom closet, grabbed the golf club she’d already singled out as a weapon, and came back to have it out with her intruder once and for all.
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    By the window which overlooked the gardens of the Trocadéro, Yasmine was contemplating the rain which had come to reconcile the earth with the sky and put