The day she became queen, there were lots of flowers, lots of noises, lots of blood, and lots of dead bodies, but she wasn’t particularly surprised. During the ten seconds that followed the explosion, she wasn’t even very agitated, not because she was in shock but because her mind was somewhere else. Three months earlier, she had read a book, or, more precisely, only the first page of a book, since it had been taken away immediately, coming as it did from a shelf in the library forbidden to her; this book told the story of a music professor and his wife and began as follows:

The first time was in Calais, where the boat had dropped them off in the early evening, at a seedy little hotel in front of the harbor dock; sixty-two years later, the last time was in a village on Lake Maggiore, after a trip to Rome, and moreover, that one was fatal (for him). …