Packed to Bursting for the Void: the unoccupied chair that has everyone rushing

This morning, at 9:03 a.m., a simple chair, defiantly empty, sparked a stampede at Place des Trois-Points.
Our reporter, an eyewitness to the invisible, recounts what he did not see but most certainly watched.

We’d need a photo; alas there’s nothing to see — which is precisely the subject. So we framed the nothing, zoomed in on the absence, and the newsroom, very professional, chose the best angle: three-quarters nonexistence with raking light. At the center of the frame: a standard chair, “patient waiting” model, around which the crowd presses to contemplate what it does not contain. We take serious notes, because it lends weight to the void.

“You had to be there to see nothing; it was spectacular,” insists Arsène L., a passing pastry chef, who says he felt “a shiver of absence” run along his left arm at the precise moment the chair welcomed no one. Others line up to photograph the in-between. A child extends her finger, touches nothing, and cries out that she “almost felt the imprint of a ghostly backside.” No one contradicts: it’s the kind of day when one politely respects the void.

At this stage, this article knows itself to be absurd. It greets you (hello), pads its numbers (we count 427 and a half sighs), corrects itself (no, 428), and returns to the grave tone adopted by hollow things to be taken seriously. We, the lines, admit that we embellish: a bit of adverb here, a dash of lyricism there, and the chair acquires an aura. Yet the crowd bears witness, the square rustles, and the nothing, stubborn, persists in being all that it is: impeccable and with no witness seated.

At 10:01, the star of the show “rested its case” — that is, an overzealous arm reflexively folded it up. The crowd applauded the folding-up as one salutes the end of a great silence. We put away our notebook, satisfied at having told the almost-nothing with the more-than-possible. Tomorrow, promise: we will investigate with the same seriousness the unfindable shadow of an unlit lamppost. To subscribers to meaning, a thousand apologies: today, the absurd had the right of way.