Hector and the Search for Happiness. Francois Lelord

because of something called ‘matrix management’. Hector thought that this sounded like an expression invented by psychiatrists, and so he wasn’t surprised that it created complicated situations and drove people a bit crazy.

      He still hadn’t told Clara the real reason for his holiday, because since the beginning of their dinner it had mostly been Clara talking about her problems at work.

      But as he was growing a little tired of this, he decided to begin his investigation into what made people happy or unhappy straight away. When Clara stopped talking in order to finish her meal, Hector looked at her and said, ‘Are you happy?’

      Clara put down her fork and looked at Hector. She seemed upset. She said, ‘Do you want to leave me?’

      And Hector saw that her eyes were shining – like when people are about to cry. He put his hand on hers and said: no, of course not (although actually there had been times when he had thought about it), he had only asked her that because he was beginning his investigation.

      Clara seemed reassured, though not completely, and Hector explained why he wanted to understand better what made people a little happy or unhappy. But now there was another thing he wanted to understand, and that was why when he’d asked Clara whether she was happy she’d thought that Hector wanted to leave her.

      She told him that she’d taken it as a criticism. As if Hector had said: ‘You’ll never be happy’ and that therefore he wouldn’t want to stay with her, because, obviously, nobody wants to live with a person who’ll never be happy. Hector assured her that this was not at all what he’d meant. In order to put Clara’s mind completely at rest, he joked around and made her laugh, and this time they both felt in love at the same time until the end of the meal and even afterwards when they went home to bed.

      Later, as he was falling asleep beside her, he told himself that his investigation had got off to a good start, that he’d already discovered two things.

      One of them he already knew, but it was good to be reminded of it: women are very complicated, even if you are a psychiatrist.

      The other would be very useful to him during his investigation: you must be careful when you ask people whether they’re happy; it’s a question that can upset them a great deal.

       HECTOR GOES TO CHINA

      HECTOR decided to go to China. He’d never been there before, and it seemed to him like a good place to think about happiness. He remembered the adventures of Tintin in The Blue Lotus, and Tintin’s friend Chang’s adoptive father, Mr Wang. The wise old Chinaman with his long white beard looked as if he might have a few interesting things to say about happiness, and there had to be people like him still in China today. Also, in The Blue Lotus this distinguished gentleman’s son goes crazy and makes his parents very unhappy. When they cry Tintin tries to comfort them, but he doesn’t really succeed. Fortunately, later on he manages to free from the clutches of villains a famous Chinese professor, who manages to cure Mr Wang’s son. In the end everybody is happy, and perhaps it was reading this moving adventure as a boy that first gave Hector the idea of becoming a psychiatrist (even though he’d never heard of the word then). Hector had also seen quite a few Chinese films at the cinema with Clara, and he’d noticed that Chinese women were very pretty, even though there weren’t that many in The Blue Lotus.

      When he boarded the aeroplane, the air hostess gave him some good news: the airline had overbooked the part of the plane where Hector was supposed to be sitting, and she was giving him a seat in the part where you normally had to pay a lot more. That part of the plane is called business class, just to make it seem as if the people sitting there are travelling on business and not for the pleasure of having a nice comfortable seat, champagne and their own private TV screen.

      Hector felt very happy to be there. His seat really was very comfortable, the air hostesses had brought him champagne, and he also felt they were smiling at him a lot – much more than when he travelled the normal way – but that might have been the effect of the champagne.

      As the plane climbed higher and higher in the sky, he began thinking about happiness. Why did he feel so happy to be there?

      Of course, he was able to stretch out comfortably, drink champagne and relax. But he could do the same thing at home in his favourite armchair, and although it was enjoyable it didn’t make him as happy as here on this aeroplane.

      He looked around. Two or three other people were smiling and looking around, and he thought that like him they must have had a nice surprise. He turned to the man next to him. He was reading a newspaper in English containing rows of numbers, with a serious expression on his face. He hadn’t taken the champagne that the air hostess had offered him. He was a bit older than Hector, a bit fatter, too, and he wore a tie with little pictures of kangaroos on it, and so Hector thought that he wasn’t going on holiday, but was travelling on business.

      Later on, they started talking. The man’s name was Charles, and he asked Hector if this was his first trip to China. Hector said it was. Charles told him that he knew China a little because he owned factories there, where Chinese people worked for less money than in the country Hector and Charles came from. ‘For less money but just as hard!’ he added.

      In these factories, they made all sorts of things for children: furniture, toys and electronic games. Charles was married and had three children; they always had plenty of toys because their father owned factories that made them!

      Hector had never really understood much about economics, but he asked Charles whether it wasn’t inconvenient to have all those things made by the Chinese and whether it might not take jobs away from the people in Hector and Charles’s country.

      A few, perhaps, Charles explained, but if he employed workers in his country, his toys would be so much more expensive than those made in other countries that nobody would buy them anyway, so it would be pointless even to try. ‘That’s globalisation for you,’ Charles concluded. Hector reflected that this was the first time during his journey that he’d heard the word globalisation, but it would surely not be the last. Charles added that one good thing was that the Chinese were becoming less poor and soon they would be able to afford toys for their own children.

      Hector told himself that he’d done well to choose psychiatry, since people weren’t about to go off to China to discuss their problems with Chinese psychiatrists, even though they were no doubt excellent.

      He asked Charles about China, in particular whether the Chinese were very different from them. Charles thought about it, and said that essentially they weren’t in fact. The greatest differences were between people in the big cities and those in the countryside, but that was true in all countries. However, he did tell Hector that he was unlikely to find anybody like Chang’s father there, because China had changed a lot since the days of The Blue Lotus.

      From the very beginning of their conversation, Hector had wanted to ask Charles if he was happy, but he remembered Clara’s reaction and this time he wanted to be careful. Eventually he said: ‘These seats are so comfortable!’ hoping that Charles might say how glad he was to be flying business class, and then they could go on to talk about happiness.

      But Charles grumbled, ‘Hmm, they don’t extend nearly as much as the ones in first class.’ And Hector understood that Charles usually flew business class, but that one day he’d been upgraded to first class (an even more expensive part of the plane) and that he’d never forgotten it.

      This made Hector think. Charles and he were sitting in identical seats, and had been offered the same champagne, but Hector was much happier because he wasn’t used to it. There was another difference: Charles had been expecting to fly business class, whereas for Hector it had been a pleasant surprise.

      It was the first small pleasure of his trip so far, but looking at Charles, Hector began worrying. What if the next time he flew economy class he regretted not being in business class, like Charles now regretted not being in first class?

      Hector