Exhibit 8 — Report
Every constituted authority, every public officer or civil servant who, in the exercise of their functions, acquires knowledge of a crime or other offence is required to give notice of it without delay to the public prosecutor and to transmit to that magistrate all the information, reports and documents relating to it.
Article 40 of the code of criminal procedure, second paragraph. Eleven lines. It is the only document somebody like me is entitled to write, and it isn't even optional.
In seven years I have logged, numbered, digitized and put back in boxes a number of reports I could give you to the nearest hundred. I had never drafted one.
I wrote it at home, rue Sébastien-Gryphe, on Saturday 11 October, at the kitchen table, beginning with the schedule, because you always begin with the list. Six sheets, numbered bottom right, six of six, with the subject and the date at the head of every page, as in the department handbook, which applies to anomaly forms and which nobody has ever forbidden anyone to apply to the rest.