Peasant women are chattering. Young aristocrats dressed in three-cornered hats and Brandenburg jackets, but with their eyes hidden behind dark glasses, slouch around a little red ochre square, where some white sheets are drying. Patrice Chereau, eighteen years old, has gotten hold of a play by Marivaux, a little-known work, The Inheritor of the Village; he sees himself labeled with a trademark that will never leave him—insolence.

The insolence of a young dandy, rich, cultivated, who gets his kicks by drawing mustaches on family portraits, say his detractors. The subversive insolence of the poet who breaks down the doors of all the prisons, including cultural ones, say his supporters. Chereau receives the attacks and the homages with a cantankerous selfassurance, with the haughty disdain of a man who knows he is going to be king.