Le Moulin buzzes with activity as committees form to coordinate a blockade of the agricultural fair, protesting the government's water plan. The narrator suspects a secret cadre will escalate to violence but is not privy to those details. She decides to be patient, applying her surveillance philosophy of letting targets come to her, much like Bruno's fishing technique.

Her contacts confirm that Deputy Minister Platon will attend the Vantôme fair with minimal security: only his driver (likely Georges) and a single bodyguard (likely the Serb), since heavy security would undermine his goal of building rural trust. The narrator recalls past infiltrations at agricultural fairs in Nebraska and Schaffhausen, the latter ending with activists arrested for trying to sabotage John Deere tractors using bleach—on her own advice—while she clapped from the crowd.

She learns Platon's accompanying "friend" is not his mistress but the famous, controversial novelist Michel Thomas. She watches a YouTube interview of him promoting his novel The Pareto Effect, observing his affected smoking, dentures, and self-styled broken-hearted nihilism. She speculates about his appeal to a particular type of woman drawn to defeated men.

Vito texts her a photo from Marseille showing Lucien, Serge, and Amélie forming a cabal in his absence. The narrator and Vito banter about Michel Thomas's reputation and Celine—the writer versus the fashion house—with the narrator playing a gold-digger persona that Vito finds reassuring as a cover for her real, incomprehensible motives. The chapter ends with Michel Thomas declaring on TV that conventional literary success is for losers; he aspires to be "base and ubiquitous," like used schoolgirl underwear sold in Japanese vending machines.