Wake up call

Chloe got back from Seattle yesterday after a long day of travel. In order to help her get back on the Euro timezone, I would periodically call her (I was at work) to make sure she wasn't sleeping in the middle of the day. As you might imagine, she really appreciated this and issued an ultimatum that 9:00 was "sleepy time". The announcement was accompanied by as hard a look as she could summon up, considering that she could barely keep her eyes open. I came to bed a few hours later and immediately fell asleep, which was a welcome surprise since I haven't been sleeping well lately. I'm kind of a light sleeper, so things falling, drunks yelling at the whores on the street etc all wake me up without too much trouble. I'm not sure when this happened, because I used to be a very heavy sleeper, and in fact slept through a fire alarm in college and was woken up by firemen at my door! Anyway, I woke up around 5:00 AM and heard a sort of a fluttering noise above me. I started drifting back to sleep again after not hearing it, and then heard the same noise, but much louder. This got my attention, and I started waking up. My first thought was that there was a huge moth in the room, but there was something about the sound that seemed distinctively un-mothlike. It was at this moment that I saw a large dark shape swoop in front of my face in one direction and then the other. This was no moth. Chloe was of course completeley asleep, so I woke her, told her to stay still, and then asked her to reach out to turn on the lamp. This precipitated several events in rapid succession: chloe's realisation that there was a huge bat circling our bed, a shriek, her running out of the room and me being left to watch the bat get very angry and start increasing the speed of its circling. Keep in mind that our bedroom is small and the ceiling is low. If I stood up, my head would be in its flight path, so that was definitely out. As it calmed down, it started flying lower which I did not appreciate. It would periodically try to alight on the side of the wall, but since the moulding is smooth, there was nothing to attach to. The clear choice was to coax it out of the window, but unfortunately our shutter is broken, so it can only make a space about one foot tall and five feet wide. Nevertheless, I pulled the blanket over my head, slid off the bed to the window, opened it, and slunk out from under the newly re-agitated bat (chauve-souris: bald mouse in french). I found that chloe had closed the doors to contain the bat (and me) in the bedroom, and after wrestling it open, found her in the living room with a knit cap on and looking frantically for the telephone number of animal control in Grenoble. I grabbed the camera and got a few nice shots of our friend before he or she finally found the small shutter opening and flew away.