“American fire engines know the meaning of chrome. In America they build the definitive version of the fire engine, based on the toy version. It’s the very opposite of European practice, which takes pride in creating scale models based on our austere lorries, on which even the flashing lights have a hard time shining out. Try giving one of these European-style toys  to your six-year-old nephew and he will pull a face. Thomas likes American fire engines, in that they look to him like an exalted version of a childish whim. So not being a stranger to exaltation myself, I challenged Thomas immediately to a life-size American truck race. So we set off, all sirens blaring, at top speed, on the Atomes project. This was more or less the pace at which I presented him with my first draft of Solyvène Targamé, of which he understood nothing except that it was about a lawn, grasshoppers and that several colours were mentioned. Having above all transposed a sort of childhood whim of the moment, when I realised that Thomas understood nothing of it, I pulled a face. So there; each of us stood in his corner, attacking the other at the pace we suspected of the other: there he was trying to be a cancer-tormented Dziga Vertov in an exaggeratedly colourful Québec, whilst I resequenced my text in couplets, prayers, dances and songs  in order to emphasise my initial whim. So much so that in the end, we crashed into each other, lorries gleaming, two electrified rhythms. We had built a truly organic toy, half way between a man and a grasshopper. I walked onto the stage amid Thomas’s images, rather as if I had installed myself in Jupiter and Semele’s bedchamber prepared by Gustave Moreau: struck by coloured bolts of lightning. It was perfect. I could no longer stand still. My text came out like the scream of a fireman’s siren, with a chrome handle. “