On reaching the preantepenultimate chapter, the author subjects us to a harsh gedankenexperiment, asking us to leave our armchairs for a journey to a dystopian future in which a harsh reduction ad absurdum of the previous 3,000 pages ensues, stripping the story of all its former ambiguity and plurisignification, and we learn that the princesse lointaine had died centuries ago -- such are the labored plot manipulations of this lamentable genre of fiction!