Le ver volant

Le ver volant names a childhood vision in which Loïc becomes a glowing worm and travels beyond the limits of his body. The episode’s decisive significance lies in its unresolved double meaning: remembered as a feverish fantasy, it also becomes an early image of Loïc’s divided identity and a possible first encounter with the cameo’s baleful influence.

The Vision and Its Bodily Transformation

The episode belongs to the winter of 1952, after Guillaume D’Anjou has returned from hospital close to death and physically diminished. Loïc’s nights have become terrifying: he feels something twisting inside him, hears strange gurgling and cracking sounds, and imagines the worm surrounding him in the darkness. When panic sends him calling for help, Laurette reassures him, lights the corridor, and leaves his door ajar. The episode begins in bodily dread and the need for ordinary human comfort.

In the vision itself, that dread turns into transformation. Loïc does not merely watch the worm: he feels himself becoming it, as it unfolds from his mouth ring by ring, luminous and translucent, its body shining from within as it disappears into the night. His skin seems to turn inside out and his body to double into the creature. Terror gives way to fascination, and the child is carried beyond himself as if in flight. The vision’s movement from enclosure to escape makes metamorphosis both frightening and liberating.

As the worm, Loïc moves through hidden and exposed spaces alike, along walls and ceilings and into closed rooms. The imagined passage grants him access to what ordinary sight cannot reach. He sees Guillaume’s failing heart, laboured breathing, and recurring pain, linking the vision to the heart attack that had struck him the previous autumn. The fantastic journey thus passes through a concrete household and the vulnerable body of the adoptive father; it is not flight from family life so much as an uncanny way of entering it.

Retrospective Explanations

About half a century later, Loïc considers several possible sources for the experience rather than settling on one. He wonders whether the flying worm developed from an airplane trip with his aviator father: a surreal extension of seeing the village from above. In that reading, the aerial perspective also bears on his painful division between hostile fathers. The worm’s escape from gravity becomes an imagined escape from confinement in time and space, and from the weight of existence and destiny.

That psychological account does not close the question. Loïc also connects the vision with the cameo’s baleful radiance, whose significance would become clear to him later. He wonders whether an invisible double drew him across the boundary of ordinary reality, and understands the episode as a brief capacity to perceive dimensions usually screened out by the rational mind. The narrative preserves these explanations side by side: fever and fantasy, childhood experience reframed through memory, and a possible opening onto the supernatural.

Memory and Narrative Significance

The episode does not remain an isolated childhood spectacle. Loïc recalls that it left a deep trace in his subconscious and that later encounters with people, realities, or experiences could revive an echo of the earlier vision. Its return is therefore less a simple repetition than a sudden reopening of buried memory. The worm becomes a figure for access to what lies beneath the immediately visible world.

Le ver volant also gives form to Loïc’s divided sense of self. In the vision, he is at once the child enclosed in his body and the creature that carries him beyond it; in retrospect, he can read that doubling through his divided paternal attachments as well as through the possibility of an unseen double. The story leaves the explanation unsettled, allowing the episode to serve simultaneously as a fever memory, an image of escape, and an early intimation of the cameo’s power.