Faits divers

I came across this startling little item last week. Let's talk it through:

You're sitting at home on a Saturday night in your Montparnasse apartment, when you become aware of a nasty odour. You realise it's coming from above. Judging from the stench and the smoke billowing down, someone is cooking up a smelly storm. It's that young man in the maid's room under the roof. Again.

Enough's enough. You screw up your nose, climb the stairs, and knock on his door. He opens, you say your piece.

And then he STABS you in the THROAT. Your husband rushes up to help you, and he gets knifed too. The young man drops the knife, jumps out the window and runs away over the rooftops, finally jumping to his death. Your husband watches helplessly as you bleed, bleed, bleed, and die.

A dispute over cooking smells results in a murder-suicide. I cannot understand. I try to make light of it - how dramatically French to be so offended by culinary criticism - but it doesn't work. I ask myself: what on earth was he cooking? I hastily review tonight's menu and check for offensive ingredients.

But ultimately, I can only shake my head in disbelief at the tragic, tawdry pointlessness of it all. The unknowable illness which caused such a reaction, and the untold sadness left behind by this little paragraph so easily missed on the metro ride to work.