Suspended Sentences

FLOWERS OF RUIN

That Sunday evening in November, I was on Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée. I was skirting the high wall around the Institut des Sourds-Muets. To the left rises the bell tower of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. I could still recall a café at the corner of Rue Saint-Jacques, where I used to go after taking in a film at the Studio des Ursulines.

On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It’s the neighborhood of colleges and convents. My memory dredged up a few outdated names: Estrapade, Contrescarpe, Tournefort, Pot-de-Fer … I felt apprehensive crossing through places where I hadn’t set foot since I was eighteen, when I attended a lycée on the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.

Those areas looked the same to me as when I’d last seen them in the early sixties, as if they’d been abandoned at around the same time, more than twenty-five years ago. On Rue Gay-Lussac — that quiet street where once they’d pried up the cobblestones and erected barricades — the door of a hotel was boarded up and most of the windows were missing their panes. But the sign remained affixed to the wall: Hôtel de l’Avenir. Hotel of the Future. What future? The one, already past, of a student from the 1930s who took a small room in that hotel after graduating from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and who on Saturday nights would have his friends over. They would go around the corner to watch a film at the Studio des Ursulines. I walked by the gate and the white shuttered building, in which the cinema occupies the ground floor. The entryway was lit. I could have walked to the Val-de-Grâce, in that peaceful zone where we had hidden, Jacqueline and I, so that the marquis would have no chance of finding her. We lived in a hotel at the end of Rue Pierre-Nicole. We subsisted on the money Jacqueline had gotten from selling her fur coat. The sundrenched street on Sunday afternoons. The privet hedges of the small brick building opposite the Collège Sévigné. The hotel balconies were covered in ivy. The dog napped in the entrance hall.

I reached Rue d’Ulm. It was deserted. Though I kept telling myself that there was nothing unusual about that on a Sunday evening in this studious, provincial neighborhood, I wondered whether I was still in Paris. In front of me, the dome of the Pantheon. It frightened me to be there alone, at the foot of that funereal monument in the moonlight, and I veered off into Rue Lhomond. I stopped in front of the Collège des Irlandais. A bell tolled eight o’clock, perhaps the one at the Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, whose massive façade rose to my right. A few more steps and I emerged onto Place de l’Estrapade. I looked for number 26 on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques. A modern building rose before me. The old one had probably been torn down a good twenty years earlier.

April 24, 1933. A young married couple commits suicide for no apparent reason.

It’s a very strange story that occurred that night in the building at number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, near the Pantheon, in the home of Mr. and Mme T.

Three years earlier, Monsieur Urbain T., a young engineer, top in his class, had married Mademoiselle Gisèle S., age twenty-six, one year his senior. Mme T. was a pretty blonde, tall and svelte. As for her husband, he was the typical dark and handsome young man. The previous July, the couple had set up house on the ground floor of 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, in a former workshop that they had converted into a studio apartment. The young newlyweds were very close. Nothing seemed to be clouding their happiness.

One Saturday evening, Urbain T. decided to take his wife out to dinner. They both left the house at around seven. They wouldn’t return home until about two in the morning, along with two couples they’d just met. The unusual din from their apartment woke the neighbors, unaccustomed to such a racket from tenants who were ordinarily so quiet. No doubt the party took a few unexpected turns.

At around four in the morning, the guests departed. During the half-hour that then passed in silence, two muffled explosions sounded. At nine o’clock, a neighbor, leaving her own apartment, passed in front of the couple’s door. She heard moaning. Suddenly remembering the shots heard in the night, she grew worried and knocked. The door opened to reveal Gisèle T. Blood was slowly leaking from a visible wound beneath her left breast. She murmured, “My husband! My husband! Dead.” A few moments later, Detective Magnan of the local police appeared on the scene. Gisèle T. was moaning, lying on the couch. In the next room, they discovered the body of her husband. The latter was still clutching a revolver in his hand. He had shot a bullet straight through his heart.

Beside him, a scribbled note: My wife killed self. We were drunk. I kill self. Don’t try …

From the police report, it appears that Urbain and Gisèle T., after their dinner out, found their way to a bar in Montparnasse. The other evening, from Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, I walked to the intersection where the Dôme and the Rotonde stand, after leaving behind the dark gardens of the Observatoire. The T.’s must have followed the same path, that night in 1933. I was surprised to find myself in a place I’d avoided since the early sixties. Like the Studio des Ursulines, the Montparnasse neighborhood always reminded me of Sleeping Beauty’s castle. I had felt the same thing at age twenty, when I spent a few nights in a hotel on Rue Delambre: Montparnasse already seemed like a quarter that had outlived itself and was slowly decaying, far from Paris. When it rained on Rue d’Odessa or Rue du Départ, I felt as if I were in a Breton port in the drizzle. The old train station, which hadn’t yet been demolished, exhaled gusts of Brest or Lorient. Here, the party had long been over. I remember that the sign for the long-vanished Jimmy’s was still clinging to the wall on Rue Huyghens, and that it was missing two or three letters which the sea breezes had blown away.

It was the first time — according to the newspapers in April 1933—that the young couple had set foot in a Montparnasse nightspot. Had they had a bit too much to drink with dinner? Or else, quite simply, had they felt like disrupting, if only for a night, the tranquil course of their lives? One witness swore he’d seen them at around ten o’clock in the Café de la Marine, a dance hall at 243 Boulevard Raspail; another, at the Cabaret des Isles on Rue Vavin, in the company of two women. The detectives showed their photos around to solicit statements, which had to be taken with a grain of salt, since one saw plenty of blonde girls with dark-haired boys, like Urbain and Gisèle T. For several days they tried to identify the two couples that the T.’s had brought home with them to Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, then the investigation was closed. Gisèle T. had been able to talk before succumbing to her injuries, but her memories were hazy. Yes, they had met two women in Montparnasse, two strangers she didn’t know much about … And those two had taken them out to Le Perreux, to a dance hall where two men had joined them. Then they’d gone to a house with a red elevator.

This evening, I’m following in their footsteps in a sullen quarter that the Tour Montparnasse veils in mourning. During the day, it hides the sun and throws its shadow onto Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and the surrounding streets. I leave behind me the Coupole, which they’re smothering under a concrete façade. It’s hard to believe that Montparnasse used to have any nightlife …

In what period, exactly, did I live in that hotel on Rue Delambre? Around 1965, when I met Jacqueline, not long before my departure for Vienna.

The room next to mine was occupied by a man of about thirty-five, a blond fellow I’d sometimes meet in the hall and who I ended up getting to know. His name? Something like Devez or Duvelz.

He was always nattily dressed and wore an official decoration on his lapel. Sometimes he invited me out for a drink, at a bar right near the hotel, the Rosebud. I didn’t dare refuse. He seemed enchanted with the place.

“It’s very pleasant here …”

He spoke from the tip of his teeth, with the voice of a well-heeled scion. He confided to me that he’d spent more than three years “in the djebel” and that he’d earned his decoration over there. But the Algerian War had sickened him. He’d needed a long time to get over it. Very soon he was going to take over for his father as head of a large textile concern in the North.

It didn’t take me long to realize he wasn’t telling the whole truth: about that “large textile concern,” he remained vague. And he contradicted himself, telling me one day that he’d graduated from Saint-Maixent, just before his departure for Algeria, then the next day that he’d done all his schooling in England. Sometimes his plummy dental accent yielded to a street hawker’s patter.

It was only because I was walking in Montparnasse that Sunday evening that Duvelz — or Devez — suddenly reemerged from the void. I remembered that one day, we had run into each other on Rue de Rennes, and he had invited me for a stein of beer, as he said, at one of those dismal cafés in Place Saint-Placide.

The Cabaret des Isles on Rue Vavin, where the couple had allegedly been spotted, occupied the basement of Les Vikings. The Scandinavian ambiance and light-colored wood of Les Vikings clashed with the Negro cabaret. You just had to go downstairs: from the Norwegian cocktails and hors-d’oeuvres of the ground floor, you were plunged into the frenzy of Martinican dances. Is that where the T.’s met the two women? I suspect it was instead at the Café de la Marine on Boulevard Raspail, near Denfert-Rochereau. I remember the apartment where Duvelz had dragged Jacqueline and me, at one end of that same Boulevard Raspail. I hadn’t dared refuse his invitation that time, either. For nearly a week, he had insisted that the two of us come on Saturday evening to visit a woman friend of his that he absolutely wanted us to meet.

She opened the door and, in the half-light of the vestibule, I couldn’t quite make out her face. I was struck by the opulence of the large living room we entered, so out of character with Duvelz’s small hotel room on Rue Delambre. He was there. He introduced us. I’ve forgotten her name: a brunette with regular features. One of her cheeks bore a large scar, near the cheekbone.

Jacqueline and I were sitting on the sofa. Duvelz and the woman, on armchairs, facing us. She must have been about Duvelz’s age: thirty-five. She looked at us with curiosity.

“Don’t you find the two of them charming?” said Duvelz in his dental accent.

She stared fixedly at us. She asked:

“Would you like something to drink?”

Things felt awkward. She served some port.

Duvelz took a large sip.

“Relax,” he said. “She’s an old friend …”

She gave us a shy smile.

“We were even engaged once. But she had to marry someone else …”

She didn’t react. She sat very straight in her chair, her glass in her hand.

“Her husband is often away. We can take advantage to go out, just the four of us. What do you say?”

“Go out where?” asked Jacqueline.

“Wherever you like. Or we don’t have to go out at all.”

He shrugged.

“We’re perfectly comfortable here … No?”

She still sat very stiffly in her chair. She lit a cigarette, perhaps to hide her nervousness. Duvelz swallowed another gulp of port. He put his glass down on the coffee table. He stood up and walked over to her.

“She’s pretty, don’t you think?”

He ran his index finger over the scar on her cheek. Then he undid her blouse and began fondling her breasts. She didn’t react.

“We were in a very serious car accident together, back in the day,” he said.

She pushed his hand away gruffly. She smiled at us again.

“You must be hungry …”

She had a husky voice and, I thought, a slight accent.

“Will you help me bring dinner in?” she asked him curtly.

“Of course.”

The two of them got up.

“It’s a cold supper,” she said. “Will that be all right?”

“That’s perfect,” said Jacqueline.

He had taken the woman by the shoulder and steered her out of the living room. He stuck his head through the doorway.

“You like champagne?”

He had lost his dental accent.

“Very much,” said Jacqueline.

“Be right back.”

We sat alone in the living room for a few minutes, and I’m racking my brains to remember as many details as I can. The French windows looking out on the boulevard were half-open because of the heat. It was at 19 Boulevard Raspail. In 1965. A grand piano at the very back of the room. The sofa and the two armchairs were made of the same black leather. The coffee table of chrome-plated metal. A name like Devez or Duvelz. The scar on the cheek. The unbuttoned blouse. A very bright light, as if from a projector, or rather a flashlight. It lights only a portion of the scene, an isolated instant, leaving the rest in shadow. We will never know what happened next or who those two people really were.

We slipped out of the living room and, without shutting the door behind us, crept down the stairs. Earlier, we had taken the elevator, but it wasn’t red like the one mentioned by Gisèle T.

A statement by a waiter who worked in a restaurant-nightclub in Le Perreux figures on the front page of an evening paper in that month of April 1933. The headline is as follows:

POLICE SEARCHING FOR TWO COUPLES

WHO SPENT EVENING IN APARTMENT

OF YOUNG CHEMIST AND HIS WIFE

At police headquarters in the Val-de-Grâce precinct, though the investigation has been called off because it was ruled a double suicide, they tell us that the young couple had gone not only to Montparnasse but also to the banks of the Marne, to Le Perreux; and that they went not just with two women but with two women and two men…. Attempts to locate these four individuals have so far been in vain.

We went to Le Perreux in hopes of gleaning a few important details on the moments preceding the tragedy.

In a “restaurant-nightclub” on the Quai de l’Artois, they clearly remember the presence of the two young persons.

“They arrived at around ten,” states the waiter who served them. “They were alone. She was very pretty, blonde, very slim … They were sitting over there, under the balcony. Is that where they met the people they invited home? I didn’t notice. We get a lot of traffic on Saturday nights at that time of year. They didn’t seem to be having an especially good time. In any case, I remember they settled their check at eleven-thirty.”

It is hard to take this testimony at face value, as it presupposes that the T.’s had gone to Le Perreux alone, and of their own accord. But everything we know about their life in the quiet neighborhood around Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques suggests that they were not the type to frequent dance halls on the banks of the Marne on Saturday nights. No, it was certainly the two unknown women, met in Montparnasse, who took them to Le Perreux that night, as Gisèle T. had herself indicated. And one has to wonder why the waiter made such a statement. Did he confuse them with other customers? More likely, he was trying to steer the investigators away from the people in whose company he had seen the T.’s, two women and two men, no doubt regulars of the establishment. The two women from Montparnasse knew the two men. But where — asked the newspaper article — was the house with the red elevator that Gisèle T. had spoken of?

Leaving the Café de la Marine, the T.’s and the two unknown women might have taken a taxi. But no cab driver, the day after the tragedy, told investigators that he’d driven four fares to Le Perreux-sur-Marne. Nor had a single one come forward to say that he’d brought back several couples from Le Perreux to number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques at around two in the morning.

In those days, one went from Paris to Nogent-sur-Marne and Le Perreux via the train station at Bastille or the Gare de l’Est. The trains leaving from Bastille followed the so-called Vincennes line, up to Verneuil-L’Etang. I knew that line even in the early sixties, before the RER replaced it and the Bastille train station was demolished to make way for the new Opera.

The tracks ran along the viaduct on Avenue Daumesnil, whose arches were populated with cafés, warehouses, and businesses. Why do I so often walk along this viaduct in my dreams? This is what one discovered under its arches, in the shade of the plane trees along the avenue:

L’Armanite Laboratory

Garage des Voûtes

Peyremorte

Corrado Casadei

Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes Dispensary

Dell’Aversano

La Régence, furniture maker

Les Marbres Français

Café Bosc

Alligator, Ghesquière and Co.

Sava Autos

Daumesnil Wireworks

Café Labatie

La Radieuse heating

Testas, nonferrous metals

Café-Tabac Valadier

One summer evening, at Café Bosc, just before my departure for Vienna, the tables were set out on the sidewalk. I couldn’t take my eyes off the lights of the Gare de Lyon, nearby …

The train stopped at Reuilly, then at Bel-Air. It exited Paris via the Porte Montempoivre. It passed by the Braille school and made a stop at Saint-Mandé station, near the lake. Then it was Vincennes, and the station at Nogent-sur-Marne, at the edge of the forest.

From Nogent station, they would have had to walk all the way up Grande Rue to the town of Le Perreux. Unless the two men came to pick them up in a car.

It seems more likely that when leaving the Café de la Marine with the two women, they headed down into the Raspail metro stop, a few yards away from the café.

The metro runs directly to the Gare de l’Est. There, they took the train on the Mulhouse line. When it left Paris, crossing the Canal Saint-Denis, one could see, from above, the slaughterhouses of La Villette. The train stopped in Pantin. Then it ran along the Canal de l’Ourcq. Noisy-le-Sec, Rosny-sous-Bois. They arrived at Le Perreux station. They stepped onto the platform and the train continued on its way, over the viaduct that crosses the Marne River. The two women took them to a restaurant-nightclub right nearby, on the Quai de l’Artois. They were now a group of six, including the two unknown men.

I remember the Quai de l’Artois, which began at the foot of the viaduct. Just opposite was the Ile des Loups. During the years 1964 and 1965, I went to that island: a certain Claude Bernard, to whom I’d sold a music box and several old books, had invited my girlfriend, Jacqueline, and me there several times. He lived in a kind of chalet, with bow windows and verandas. One afternoon, he photographed us on one of the verandas, to try out his new camera, and a few moments later he handed us the color image: it was the first time I’d ever seen a Polaroid.

This Claude Bernard was about forty years old and made his living as a dealer in secondhand goods: he owned warehouses, a stall at the Saint-Ouen flea market, and even a used bookstore on Avenue de Clichy, which is where I’d first met him. After dinner, he drove Jacqueline and me back to Paris in a gray Jaguar. A few years later, I lost touch with him for good. His stall at the flea market and his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy had vanished into thin air. The phone number to his house on the Ile des Loups was “no longer in service.”

I’m thinking of him because of the Ile des Loups. In one of the articles about what the newspapers labeled “the tragic orgy,” they hinted that the police might have identified one of the unknown men that the T.’s and the two women had met in the restaurant-nightclub on the Quai de l’Artois: a resident of Le Perreux. As far as I’m concerned, he could only have lived on the Ile des Loups. And given the waiter’s dubious testimony, I wonder whether the T.’s and the two other couples even went to the restaurant-nightclub on the Quai de l’Artois that evening. It seems more likely that one of the men took them to the Ile des Loups, for that was where the house with the red elevator stood.

Today I’m trying to reconstruct the layout, but at the time when I went to visit Claude Bernard, I would never have imagined such a thing. Claude Bernard had not lived long in that large chalet decorated with verandas and bow windows. A wooden kiosk rose in the back of the garden.

Who had the previous owner been? A certain Jacques Henley? Henley’s photo figures in old film directories, with the caption “Speaks English and German without an accent.” A very British face: blond mustache, very pale eyes. His address is given as: Jacques Henley, “Les Raquettes,” Ile des Loups, Nogent-sur-Marne (Seine), Tremblay 12–00. But in the phone book, at the same telephone number, he is listed under the name E. J. Dothée. Among the other former inhabitants of the island that I was able to inventory:

Willame, H.

Tremblay 33-44

Magnant, L.

Tremblay 22-65

Dothée alias Henley and the two above-mentioned persons lived in the part of the island that belongs to Nogent-sur-Marne; these others lived in the eastern part, in Le Perreux:

Hevelle

Tremblay 11-97

Verchère, E. L., Les Heures  Tranquilles, Ile des Loups  (May to Oct.)

Tremblay 09-25

Kisseloff, P.

Tremblay 09-25

Korsak (de)

Tremblay 27-19

Ryan (Jean E.), La Pergola,  Ile des Loups

Tremblay 06-69

The Société d’Encouragement du Sport Nautique (Tremblay 00–80) was in the part belonging to Nogent-sur-Marne. I believe Claude Bernard’s house, for its part, was located in the eastern sector, part of Le Perreux. In short, the Ile des Loups called to mind that island in the Caribbean split between two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic — the difference being that it hadn’t won its independence, since it was under the sovereignty of Nogent and Le Perreux. The viaduct crossed through it, and this was what marked the boundary of the two zones.

Clumps of trees lining the banks concealed Claude Bernard’s house. He came to get us at the Quai de l’Artois in a small boat. The neglected garden was surrounded by a white fence. On the ground floor, a huge space that opened onto the veranda acted as the living room: a sofa, two leather armchairs, a coffee table, and a large brick fireplace. Claude Bernard was always alone in that house and gave the impression of camping out in it. When he invited us to dinner, he did the cooking himself. He had told me he was tired of living in Paris and that he couldn’t sleep without country air, and water nearby.

I suppose there’s no trace of countryside left in Le Perreux and on the Ile des Loups. They’ve no doubt razed Claude Bernard’s house. The trees and pontoon boats have disappeared from along the banks.

At the time of our first meeting, in his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy, the day when I offered him the twenty-volume set of Balzac’s complete works — the Veuve Houssiaux edition — and he had bought it from me for three thousand francs, we talked literature. He’d confided that his favorite writer was Buffon.

The works of Buffon bound in green morocco leather on the brick mantelpiece of his living room were the only books I noticed at his house. Naturally, that house on the Ile des Loups seemed strange to me, and I found Claude Bernard’s occupation as a dealer in “secondhand goods” intriguing. But most often we talked about film or literature, and that’s what he liked about me.

I remember the heavy wood paneling on the living room walls, the ironwork, but especially the elevator lined with red velvet — it no longer worked — that Claude Bernard, one day, laughingly told us had been installed by the former owner for the sole purpose of going up to his bedroom on the next floor.

That elevator was the only remaining clue to the night in April 1933 when the T.’s had ended up in Le Perreux with the two other couples. Afterward, they had returned to their sober quarters on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, but it no longer mattered. It was too late. Their fate had been sealed in Le Perreux and in the house on the Ile des Loups.

At the time, I didn’t really care about the whys and wherefores of “the tragic orgy,” or about the role of the red velvet elevator that Claude Bernard had shown us at the back of the living room. To us, the Ile des Loups and its environs were just one more suburb. On the route we took from the station to the Quai de l’Artois, where Claude Bernard was waiting for us in his boat, I was thinking that we’d soon be going away, thanks to the money from the Balzacs and the old music box I’d sold him. Before long, Jacqueline and I would be far away from the Marne and Le Perreux — in Vienna, where I’d turn twenty.

I’d like to linger on the Left Bank a while longer, being a child of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I attended the public school on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi and studied catechism with Father Pachaud on Rue de l’Abbaye and Place Furstenberg. Since then, however, I’ve avoided my former village, which I no longer recognize. This evening, the Carrefour de l’Odéon seems as desolate to me as the Breton port of Montparnasse in the drizzle.

One of my last memories of Saint-Germain-des-Prés goes back to Monday, January 18, 1960. I was fourteen and a half and I had run away from school. I had walked all the way to La Croix de Berny, skirting the hangars of the Villacoublay airfield. Then I’d taken a bus to the Porte d’Orléans, and then the metro. I had gotten off at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I ended up in a café, Chez Malafosse, at the end of Rue Bonaparte where it meets the quay. At least, Chez Malafosse is what my father used to call it. After lunch, we’d be in his office with his friends and he’d say to me:

“Go get us some Partagas at Malafosse.”

That afternoon, at Chez Malafosse, a group of people my mother knew, who were always hanging about in that neighborhood, were standing at the bar. Among them was a pretty Danish girl with short blond hair and periwinkle eyes. She used slang words that clashed with her soft, childlike accent. Slang that was often outmoded. When she saw me come in, she said:

“What the fuck are you doing here, old top?”

I confessed that I was playing hooky. There was an embarrassed silence. I was on the verge of bursting into tears. Suddenly, she said, with her Danish accent:

“What the fuck does that matter, old top?”

Then she slammed the palm of her hand down on the counter:

“A whiskey for Old Top here …”

I recall the billiards players upstairs at the Café de Cluny. I happened to be there, one Saturday afternoon in January, the day of Churchill’s funeral. It was in 1966 that they renovated all the cafés on Place Saint-Michel and the boulevard; in recent years, some became McDonald’s, like the Mahieu, where the off-track bettors used to gather, and where one could hear the crackling of the machine as it spewed out the racing results.

Until the late sixties, the neighborhood had remained unchanged. The events of May ’68, which it hosted, left only black-and-white news images, which at a quarter-century’s remove seem as distant as the ones filmed during the Liberation of Paris.

Boulevard Saint-Michel is engulfed in a December-like fog this Sunday evening, and the image of a street resurfaces in my memory, one of the few streets in the Latin Quarter — the only one, I think — that often figures in my dreams. I finally identified it. It slopes gently down to the boulevard, and the contagion of dreams into reality ensures that Rue Cujas will always remain frozen for me in the light of the early sixties, a soft, limpid light that I associate with two films from that time: Lola and Adieu Philippine.

Toward the bottom of the street, on the ground floor of a hotel, there used to be a movie theater, the Studio Cujas. One July afternoon I entered the cool and darkness of that theater, out of idleness, and I was the only spectator.

A bit farther up, on the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, I used to meet a girl I knew who acted in New Wave films — as we called them then.

I thought about her yesterday afternoon, when I crossed paths by the gates of the Jardins du Luxembourg with a man wearing a ratty Shetland pullover, whose brown hair and hawk nose seemed familiar. Yes, of course, I often used to see him in the café where that girl and I would meet. A certain François, nicknamed “the Philosopher,” probably because he gave private lessons in philosophy.

He didn’t recognize me. He was holding a book and he looked like an overripe student. I had returned to that neighborhood by chance, after a quarter of a century, and now here was that unchanged man, forever faithful to the sixties. I could have said something to him, but the amount of time since our last meeting made him inaccessible, like someone I’d left on the beach of a faraway island. I had set sail.

I saw him again today, on the other side of the gardens, in the company of a young blonde. He lingered for a moment, talking to her at the entrance to the RER station that replaced the old Luxembourg stop. Then she went down the steps and left him on his own.

He walked with quick steps on the sidewalk of Boulevard Saint-Michel toward Port-Royal. He was still holding his book. I tried to follow him, keeping an eye on his Shetland pullover with its greenish stain, until I lost sight of it around Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée.

I crossed through the gardens. Was it because of meeting that ghost? Or the alleys of the Luxembourg, where I hadn’t walked in ages? In the late-afternoon light, it seemed to me that the years had become conflated and time transparent. One day, I had accompanied that girl who acted in movies, in her convertible, from the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève to the Saint-Maurice film studios. We followed the river to the outskirts of Paris and the plane trees formed a canopy of foliage. It was in the spring of 1963 or 1964.

The snow that turns into mud on the sidewalks, the railings around the Cluny thermal baths where unlicensed street hawkers had their stalls, the bare trees, all those tones of gray and black that I still recall put me in mind of Violette Nozière. She used to meet her dates in a hotel on Rue Victor-Cousin, near the Sorbonne, and at the Palais du Café on Boulevard Saint-Michel.

Violette was a pale-skinned brunette whom the tabloids of the time compared to a venomous flower and whom they nicknamed the “poison girl.” She struck up acquaintances at the Palais du Café with ersatz students wearing jackets that were too tight at the waist and tortoiseshell glasses. She convinced them she was expecting a large inheritance and promised them the moon: exotic trips, a Bugatti … She had probably crossed paths on the boulevard with the T. couple, who had just moved into their small apartment on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques.

A bit farther down the street from the Palais du Café, on the opposite side, a twenty-year-old girl, Sylviane, played billiards upstairs at the Cluny. She wasn’t a pale brunette like Violette, but auburn-haired, with the kind of coloring you might call Irish. She wouldn’t remain long in the grayness of the Latin Quarter. Soon she would be spotted in the Faubourg Montmartre, at the Fantasio, and in the billiards parlors on Boulevard des Capucines. Then she’d frequent the Cercle Haussmann on Rue de la Michodière, where she’d meet some patrons. Gifts, jewelry, the easy life, the riding club in Neuilly … At the start of the Occupation, she would marry a penniless suitor who nonetheless bore the title marquis of the empire. She would spend long sojourns in the Free Zone, on the Côte d’Azur, and the president of the Société des Bains de Mer in Monaco would count among her admirers. Her return to the Occupied Zone … Her meeting with a certain Eddy Pagnon in dubious circumstances … But, in that spring of 1933, she was still living with her mother, in Chelles, in the Seine-et-Marne region, and she commuted to Paris on a Meaux line train that dropped her off at the Gare de l’Est. According to a witness questioned by the detectives, one of the two women who brought the T. couple to Le Perreux had auburn hair and didn’t seem older than twenty. She lived in the eastern suburbs. But was her name Sylviane?

She crops up again eleven years later, in the spring of 1944, in a small hotel on the Quai d’Austerlitz. She’s waiting for that Eddy Pagnon who, since the month of May, has been bootlegging wine from Bordeaux to Paris.

On evenings when he has to drive from Paris to Bordeaux, he stops the truck across from the hotel, on the sidewalk next to the river, in the shadow of two rows of plane trees. He goes to meet her in her room. Soon it will be curfew. The distant rumbling of the metro over the Pont de Bercy occasionally breaks the silence. Through the window of the hall that leads to her room, one can still see, in the twilight, the tracks of the Gare d’Austerlitz; but they’re deserted and one wonders if the station has been abandoned.

They have dinner downstairs, in the café. The door and windows have their curtains drawn because of the blackout. They are the only diners. They get served food from the black market, and the hotel manager, who was on the phone behind the counter, comes to sit with them. Pagnon makes his trips between Bordeaux and Paris on behalf of this man, who owns a warehouse nearby, on the Quai Saint-Bernard, at the Halle aux Vins, the central wine market. After dinner, the manager gives Pagnon a few final instructions. Sylviane then walks him to the truck on the Quai d’Austerlitz. The engine rumbles for a long while, then the truck disappears into the dark. She returns to her hotel room and lies down on the unmade bed. A bed with brass bars. Walls covered in old wallpaper with pink roses. A pause. She has known hotel rooms like this, when she was much younger, on nights when she didn’t go home to Chelles to sleep in her mother’s minuscule cottage.

She will wait for him until the following evening. He’ll drive the truck to the warehouse in the Halle aux Vins so they can unload his cargo and then he’ll go on foot from the Quai Saint-Bernard to the hotel. In that fleabag, she reconnects with the décor of her youth. As for me, I recall a childhood memory: fat Lucien P. sprawled on one of the leather armchairs in my father’s office. I had heard them talking one day about a certain Sylviane with auburn hair. Was it Fat Lucien who introduced her to my father or the other way around? From what he confided to me, my father had also frequented the Latin Quarter in the early thirties, in the same period and at the same age as Violette Nozière and Sylviane. Perhaps he had first met her in the billiards room of the Café de Cluny.

A little past the Quai d’Austerlitz, near the Pont de Bercy, do the warehouses known as the Magasins Généraux still exist? In the winter of ’43, my father had been interned in that annex of the Drancy transit camp. One evening, someone came and had him released: was it Eddy Pagnon, who was then part of what they later called the Rue Lauriston gang? Too many coincidences make me think so: Sylviane, Fat Lucien … I tried to find the garage where Pagnon worked before the war and, among the new scraps of information that I’ve managed to gather on him, there is this: arrested by the Germans in November 1941 for having double-crossed them in a black market affair involving raincoats. Detained at La Santé. Freed by Chamberlin, alias “Henri.” Goes to work for him on Rue Lauriston. Leaves the Rue Lauriston gang three months before the Liberation. Retires to Barbizon with his mistress, the marquise d’A. He owned a racehorse and an automobile. Gets himself a job as driver of a truck transporting wines from Bordeaux to Paris.

When my father left the Magasins Généraux, I wonder what route he took in the blackout. He must have felt dumbfounded at having been spared.

Of all the neighborhoods on the Left Bank, the area that stretches from the Pont de Bercy to the fences around the Jardin des Plantes remains the most crepuscular for me. One arrives by night at the Gare d’Austerlitz. And night, around here, smells like wine and coal. I leave behind the train station and those dark masses along the Seine that were referred to as the “Port of Austerlitz warehouses.” The automobile headlights or the flashlight illuminate a few feet of the Quai Saint-Bernard, just in front. The smells of wine and coal now mix with the scent of leaves from the botanical gardens, and I hear the cry of a peacock and the roar of a jaguar and a tiger from the zoo. The plane trees and the silence of the Halle aux Vins. I am enveloped by a cellarlike chill. Somewhere someone is rolling a barrel, and that doleful sound slowly fades into the distance. It seems that in place of the old wine market they’ve now erected tall concrete buildings, but wide as I might open my eyes in the dark, I can’t see them.

To reach the south, one needed to go through tunnels: Tombe-Issoire, Glacière, Rue de la Santé, lit at intervals by a blue bulb. And one emerged onto the sundrenched avenues and fields of Montsouris.

The Porte d’Italie marked the eastern border of that territory. Boulevard Kellermann led west, up to the Poterne des Peupliers. To the right, the SNECMA plant looked like a huge cargo ship run aground on the edge of the boulevard, especially on nights when the moon was reflected in its windows. A bit farther on, to the left, was the Charléty stadium. Weeds grew through cracks in the concrete.

I went to that neighborhood for the first time on a Sunday, because of a friend who had dragged me to Charléty. Despite being only seventeen, he had snagged a low-level job on a sports newspaper. They sent him to cover a footrace, and he wanted me to help him write his article.

There weren’t many of us in the stands. I remember the name of one of the runners: Piquemal. We asked him a few questions at the end of the race to flesh out the article. At around five, we waited for the number 21 bus, but it never showed. We then decided to walk to the center of Paris. The streets were empty in the bright sun. I could pinpoint the exact date: at the first newsstand we came across — not really a newsstand, more like one of those green canvas stalls that crop up on Sundays — I saw the photo and large headlines announcing the death of Marilyn Monroe.

After Charléty, the Cité Universitaire, and to the left, the Parc Montsouris. At the beginning of the street that skirted the park was an apartment building with large picture windows, where the aviator Jean Mermoz had lived. The shadows of Mermoz and SNECMA — a factory that made airplane engines — have linked that neighborhood in my mind with Orly airport, right nearby, and with the airfields of Villacoublay, Buc, and Toussus-le-Noble.

Restaurants that were almost rustic. Opposite the building where Mermoz would come home between two airmail runs was the Chalet du Lac. Its terrace opened onto the Parc Montsouris. And lower down, at the corner of Avenue Reille, a small restaurant whose garden was covered in gravel. In the summer, they set out tables and one could dine beneath the arbor.

For me, with the passage of time, that entire neighborhood has become gently detached from Paris. In one of the two cafés at the end of Rue de l’Amiral-Mouchez, near the Charléty stadium, a jukebox played Italian songs. The owner was a swarthy woman with a Roman profile. Summer light bathes Boulevard Kellermann and Boulevard Jourdan, deserted in midday. In my dreams, I see shadows on the sidewalks and the ochre façades of buildings that hide slivers of countryside, and from now on they belong to the outskirts of Rome. I walk the length of the Parc Montsouris. The foliage protects me from the sun. Farther on is the Cité Universitaire metro stop. I’ll reenter the coolness of the small station. Trains come at regular intervals and carry us to the beaches at Ostia.

Jacqueline had rented a room in one of those clusters of buildings on Boulevard Kellermann, built before the war on the site of the old fortifications. Thanks to fake student IDs, we could take our meals, for a mere five francs, at the Cité Universitaire cafeteria: it occupied the vast paneled foyer of a structure that called to mind the hotels of Saint-Moritz or Cimiez.

It often happened that we spent entire days and nights on the lawns or in the foyers of the various pavilions. There was even a movie house and an auditorium in the Cité.

A holiday spa, or one of those international concessions like they had in Shanghai. That neutral zone, at the very edge of Paris, gave its residents diplomatic immunity. When we crossed the border with our fake identity cards, we were safe from all harm.

I met Pacheco at the Cité Universitaire. I had already noticed him a few months earlier. In January of that year, there had been a lot of snow, and the Cité looked like a winter resort. On several occasions I had crossed paths, on Boulevard Jourdan, with a man of about fifty wearing a faded brown coat whose sleeves were too long, black corduroy trousers, and snow boots. His brown hair was brushed back and his cheeks bore several days’ stubble. He walked cautiously, as if with every step he were afraid of skidding on the snow.

By the following June, he was no longer the same. His tan linen suit, sky-blue shirt, and buckskin shoes seemed brand new. His shorter hair and smooth-shaven cheeks made him look younger. Did we strike up a conversation in the Cité Universitaire cafeteria, whose windows looked out on Boulevard Jourdan? Or across the street, at the Brasserie Babel? My sense is at the cafeteria, because of that airportlike ambiance that for me is indissociable from Pacheco: a décor of plastic and metal, the comings and goings of people speaking a multitude of languages, as if in transit. Moreover, that day Pacheco was carrying a black leather suitcase. And he told me he worked for Air France, without my quite understanding whether he was an airline steward or whether he had a desk at Orly. He lived in a room in the Pavillon des Provinces Françaises. And as I expressed surprise that he could be living at the Cité Universitaire at his age, he showed me a card saying he was enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences, on the site of the old Halle aux Vins.

I didn’t dare tell him that I already knew him by sight. Had he noticed me as well, that winter? Was he waiting for me to ask him about it? Or had he convinced himself that I could hardly make a connection between the tramp in snow boots and the man sitting opposite me? His blue eyes gave away none of his thoughts.

The silhouette with the faded brown overcoat and halting steps had melted with that year’s snow. And no one had noticed. Except me.

From then on, we met him at the Cité cafeteria or in the small restaurant on Avenue Reille that featured “Oriental” specialties. Our conversations were anodyne: he explained that he couldn’t take a full course load at the Faculty of Sciences because of his job. But what exactly was his job?

“Oh … I work as a kind of steward. Sometimes on board planes, or in the offices at Orly … or in the terminal at Invalides … Three days a week …”

He had fallen silent. I hadn’t pushed. He hung out with Moroccan students who lived in the first pavilion as you entered the Cité, just after the Charléty stadium. The Moroccans were with some very blond Scandinavian girls and two Cubans. With this group, we would go see a film on Saturday evenings and, often, we would gather in the room that one of the Scandinavian girls occupied at the Fondation Deutsch-de-la-Meurthe, a village composed of small pavilions with brick walls and ivy. Pacheco invited us all to dinner beneath the arbor of the restaurant on Avenue Reille, and at dessert he handed out presents—“duty free” cigarettes, perfumes, lighters that he procured at Orly.

Now and again we’d be joined by a tall, dark man who worked for Air Maroc and had lived at the Cité Universitaire a few years back. Pacheco used the familiar tu with him. It was probably through this fellow that he’d met the others. Pacheco took part in the group’s merriments, its jokes, the sunbathing on the lawns of the Cité. He joined in the conversations. But I always felt he was a bit removed, though I told myself it was because of the age difference between him and us.

One Sunday evening, he was alone in the cafeteria and he’d invited Jacqueline and me to have a pan-bagnat and an apple tart. I was on the point of asking him about the tramp with the faded overcoat from last winter, but I stopped myself. I only asked whether his name, Pacheco, was of Spanish or Portuguese origin.

“My father was Peruvian.”

He gazed at us one after the other, as if to reassure himself that there was no danger in sharing a confidence.

“My mother was half-Belgian, half-French. And, through her, I’m a descendant of Maréchal Victor.”

I confess that at the time I knew nothing about the marshal. I only knew that there was a Boulevard Victor, farther on, near the Porte de Versailles.

“Maréchal Victor was a marshal under the First Empire. Napoleon made him duc de Bellune.”

He had said it in a detached tone. He seemed to find it natural that the name Victor meant nothing to us.

“When I was younger, I used to go by the name Philippe de Bellune, but I had no real right to the title.”

So, his given name was Philippe. We had gotten used to calling him Pacheco, and for us, “Pacheco” acted as both first and last name.

“Why no right to the title?”

“The last duc de Bellune had only girls, one of whom was my grandmother, and the title became extinct. Are you really interested in this?”

“Yes.”

It was the first time he’d given me any personal information. Up until then, I’d had no reference points. The man was as slippery and elusive as his gaze. Even his age was hard to pin down: somewhere between thirty-five and fifty.

“That’s a nice name, ‘Philippe de Bellune.’ You should have kept calling yourself that.”

“You think so?”

He shrugged his shoulders and rested his blue eyes on me for a moment. The image of the tramp walking along Boulevard Jourdan in a faded brown coat came to mind: perhaps people knew him by the name Philippe de Bellune.

“When did you stop calling yourself Philippe de Bellune?”

“Are you sure you’re interested in this?”

A few of our Moroccan and Scandinavian friends came to sit at our table, and Pacheco regained his reserve. He joined in the conversation but spoke only in generalities. We left the cafeteria very late. Pacheco was carrying the black leather suitcase that I’d seen him with several times before.

We parted company in the foyer of the Pavillon des Provinces Françaises. The night was warm and Jacqueline and I went to sit on a bench surrounded by privet hedges, which sheltered us from prying eyes. This is probably why Pacheco didn’t notice us when he went out again ten minutes later, his black leather suitcase in hand. We held our breath. We both had the same thought: he only pretended to live in the Pavillon des Provinces Françaises, and the minute he was sure he wouldn’t run into anyone from our little group, he left the pavilion for an unknown destination.

We waited until he was about fifty yards ahead of us before starting to follow him. Exiting the Cité Universitaire, he turned left toward the Porte d’Orléans and his outline vanished in the night. Where could he be going? Where did he really live? I imagined him walking straight ahead, up to the Porte de Versailles, and finally reaching that desolate boulevard that bore the name of his ancestor. He walked along it slowly, suitcase in hand, like a sleepwalker, and at that late hour he was the only pedestrian.

We saw him again the next day, still just as well groomed in his tan linen suit and suede shoes. He was no longer carrying his valise, but rather a small, navy blue travel bag from British Airways slung across his shoulders. Our eyes met, his as vacant as ever. It was up to me to solve the enigma of that man. Pacheco. Philippe de Bellune. Using just those two names, I had to unearth other details about him. At around that time, to make some money, I had started buying and reselling batches of books, assorted documents, complete collections of magazines. On the off chance, I searched for the names Bellune and Pacheco in the indexes of old newspapers that passed through my hands, like a ragman poking his hook into a pile of garbage.

And so I managed to garner a few scraps of information: the last duc de Bellune was, on his mother’s side, of Anglo-Portuguese origin by the Lemos and Willoughby da Silveira families. Died in 1907, without a male heir. His youngest daughter had married a certain Fernand-Marie-Désiré Werry de Hults, Belgian but a “Roman count,” and from their union were born two sons and a daughter named Eliane. In 1919, according to the Social Register, they all lived in a private hotel at 4 Rue Greuze in the sixteenth arrondissement. And in fact, listed at the same address were a certain Riclos y Perez de Pacheco and wife, née Eliane de Hults. These two were surely the parents of the Pacheco I knew. As of 1927, judging from the phone books, this curious family had disappeared from number 4 Rue Greuze without leaving a trace. In 1953, a comtesse de Hultz-Bellune resurfaced, at 4 Rue du Dôme, and, the following year, at the same address and phone number: Pacheco (Mme de). Then, nothing.

On the few occasions when I was alone with Pacheco in the cafeteria, I ventured a question in hopes that he’d answer and fill in other bits of information.

“In 1953, did you go visit your mother on Rue du Dôme?”

That time, I saw I’d touched a nerve. He suddenly turned white as a sheet. I needed to push my advantage.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He was on the defensive. Why had that detail upset him so much? I thought I knew the answer: 1953, 1954 … It was no longer about his ancestor, Maréchal Victor. We were getting dangerously close to the present and to a tramp in a faded coat and worn snow boots who only recently had paced up and down Boulevard Jourdan. I was eager to see his reaction when I mentioned that man to him. Would he flinch, like someone who’s afraid of his shadow?

Several weeks passed, during which there was no sign of him. Did his work keep him away from the Cité Universitaire? At the Pavillon des Provinces Françaises, I inquired whether a certain Pacheco had a room there. They knew of no such student by that name, or of anyone in his fifties with short hair who wore a tan linen suit and buckskin shoes. Evenings in the cafeteria, I questioned members of our little group.

“Any news of Pacheco?”

“Nope.”

Already our Moroccan and Scandinavian friends had stopped talking about him. He was fading from their memories. Life went on without Pacheco: the afternoons and evenings on the great lawn, walks through the Parc Montsouris, dinners beneath the arbor of the Asian restaurant on Avenue Reille … I ended up thinking we’d never see him again. As luck would have it, I chanced upon two small items in a batch of old newspapers from the years 1946 to 1948. The first gave a list of persons being sought because of collaborationist activities during the Occupation. Among these figured “Philippe de Bellune, alias ‘de Pacheco,’ said to have died last year following his internment at Dachau.” But there seemed to be some doubt about this alleged death. Two years later, in 1948, a newspaper published a small item listing indicted individuals who had failed to show up for their court hearing, and who were now wanted by the police: number 3 on the list was “Philippe de Bellune, born Paris, January 22, 1918, no known address.” Which means that his death had still not been confirmed by then.

The fate of a man wanted for colluding with the enemy, who might or might not have survived the Dachau concentration camp, left me puzzled. What set of circumstances could have pulled him into such a conflictual situation? I thought of my father, who had weathered all the contradictions of the Occupation period, and who had told me practically nothing about it before we parted forever. And now here was Pacheco, whom I’d barely known, and who was also slipping away without providing an explanation.

He reappeared one Sunday night, in the Cité cafeteria. It was late and there was no one left around the Formica tables. I was sitting next to the window that looked out on Boulevard Jourdan and, when I saw him enter in his tan suit and suede moccasins — his hair a bit longer than usual and his skin tanned — my heart skipped a beat. He came over to sit beside me as naturally as if he’d left only moments earlier to make a phone call.

“I thought we’d never see you again,” I said to him.

“Air France sent me to work in an airfield in Morocco … In Casablanca … I had to stay for quite a while.”

“I found out you were interned in Dachau during the war,” I blurted.

“No.”

He sat without moving, staring straight ahead, as if he dreaded other revelations from me.

“And that you were wanted by the police after the war for conspiring with the enemy. It was back when you called yourself Philippe de Bellune.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“For a while, they thought you had died in Dachau …”

“Died?”

He shrugged.

“Why were they looking for you after the war?”

He sliced his pan-bagnat into very thin strips, using a fork and knife.

“You’ve got an active imagination … But this evening I’m very tired …”

He gave me a smile, and I understood that I wouldn’t get anything out of him. In the days that followed, we saw each other with the rest of the group, with no opportunity for a private conversation. He invited us to dinner, as was his wont, at the restaurant on Avenue Reille. His friend from Air Maroc was there that evening. And, as usual, he handed out “duty free” cartons of American cigarettes, perfumes, and fountain pens, and little souvenirs he’d brought back from Casablanca.

I didn’t want to embarrass him by asking if he really lived at the Pavillon des Provinces Françaises. We again had occasion, several times, to walk him back to his pavilion at night and watch him go up the large staircase, but I didn’t feel like sitting on the bench behind the privet hedges to see if he’d go out again a few minutes later.

One late afternoon in that month of September, while we were lying on the lawn of the Cité Universitaire, enjoying the last of the warm weather, Pacheco showed us photos of the airfield and the avenues of Casablanca. On one of them, we could see him in a steward’s uniform in front of a building whose whiteness stood out against the cerulean sky. Everything was distinct in that sundrenched décor: the whites and blues, the shadow jutting out from the foot of the building, the sand-colored steward’s uniform, Pacheco’s smile, and the gleaming fuselage of a sightseeing plane in the background. But I was thinking of a certain Philippe de Bellune whose contour had melted into the fog long ago. His fate had been so uncertain that they thought he’d died right after the war. He didn’t even use his real name. What had the life of that man been like, the one born in Paris on January 22, 1918? He must have spent the early years of his childhood at 4 Rue Greuze, in the home of his parents and grandparents. Out of curiosity, I’d checked the phone book: 4 Rue Greuze was now the seat of the Chaldean Church. They had probably turned the ground floor into a chapel, where they celebrated the rites of that Eastern religion. Had they left his childhood bedroom intact? I planned to attend a Chaldean Mass, then slip out of the chapel to go explore the upper floors of the private hotel. And perhaps find witnesses who had known Pacheco on Rue Greuze. At number 2, the building next door, a Princess Duleep-Singh had lived around 1920, and that name awakened a childhood memory: I’m waiting for my father one Friday evening, in a train station on the Normandy coast. Among the passengers getting off the train from Paris is a dark-complexioned woman surrounded by turbaned servants and several young English girls in riding breeches who seem to be lady’s companions. They pile a large number of suitcases onto carts. One of them jostles me as it goes past. I fall and hurt my knee. Immediately, the woman helps me up, leans over me, and, using a handkerchief and a small vial of perfume, rubs the scrape on my knee with a maternal gesture. She’s a woman of about thirty, and the gentleness and beauty of her face fill me with wonder. She smiles at me. She strokes my hair. In front of the station, several American cars are waiting for her.

“A Hindu princess,” my father had said.

In what boarding school had they enrolled young Philippe Riclos y Perez de Pacheco? Who were his friends in 1938, when he was twenty? What profession was he destined for? I imagined him being left to his own devices. The war and the Occupation had finished sowing disorder and confusion in a young man with a highly indecisive personality. He must not even have been very sure of his identity, since he called himself Philippe de Bellune at the time, as if trying to cling to the only reference marker he had in life, and a very distant one at that: his ancestor, Maréchal Victor, the duc de Bellune.

No doubt he had fallen in with bad company. The article from 1946 specifies that a warrant had been issued against him and several others, including a “countess” von Seckendorff and a “baron” de Kermanor. Were those noble titles as authentic as Philippe de Bellune’s? The list published in the newspaper from 1948 again contained their three names.

Proceedings brought by the Chief Inspector, Crimes of Collaboration, against:

1) Lebobe, André, born October 6, 1917, Paris 14. Broker. 22 Rue Washington.

2) Sherrer, Alfred, alias “The Admiral,” born March 26, 1915, Hanoi (Indochina). No known address.

3) Philippe de Bellune, born Paris, January 22, 1918, son of Mario Riclos y Perez de Pacheco and Eliane Werry de Hults, no known address.

4) Bremont, Roger, born February 24, 1910, Paris, alias “Roger Breugnot,” no known address.

5) Yevremovitch, Miodraf, alias “Draga,” born March 23, 1911, Valjevo (Yugoslavia), formerly of 2 Square des Aliscamps, Paris 16, no known current address.

6) Ruiz, José, alias “Vincent,” alias “Vincent Vriarte,” born April 26, 1917, Sestao (Spain), no known address.

7) Galleran, Héloïse, wife of Pelaez, born April 24, 1914, Luanco (Spain), no known current address.

8) de Reith, Hildegarde-Jeanne-Caroline, wife of von Seckendorff, born February 18, 1907, Mayen (Germany), formerly of 41 Avenue Foch, Paris, no known current address.

9) Léger, Yves, 14 Rue des Dardanelles, last known address.

10) Watchmann, Johannes, 76 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, last known address.

11) Fercrou, 1 Rue Lord-Byron, last known address.

12) Cremer, Edmond, alias “Piquet,” alias “baron de Kermanor,” born October 31, 1905, Brussels. 10 Rue Berteaux-Dumas (Neuilly), last known address.

For failure to appear at the hearing of November 3, 1947.

Nor had any of them had shown up for the hearing on February 25, 1948, as ordered by the presiding judge for the Court of the Seine Department. They had disappeared for good.

Had Philippe de Bellune really been interned at Dachau? And on his return to Paris, where had he hidden out to evade the law that was calling him to account? I imagined him slipping at night into the little apartment on Rue du Dôme where the comtesse de Hults Bellune, alias Mme de Pacheco — his mother — took him in in secret, for she must have stated to the detectives that her son was indeed dead.

Often, as a precaution, mother and son arranged to meet not in the apartment but in neighborhood cafés — Place Victor-Hugo, Avenue de la Grande-Armée … One evening, they had gone together to the pawnshop on Rue Pierre-Charron to split the earnings from the last valuable piece of jewelry she could hock. Then they had walked up the Champs-Elysées. It was a winter evening in 1948, the day when the second wanted notice had been issued, proof that the law was still skeptical about Philippe de Bellune’s death … She had left him at the George-V metro stop, where he had melted into the rush-hour crowds.

Twenty years had gone by. And now, on the great lawn, Pacheco was showing us his photos of Morocco, like a tourist back from holiday. Perhaps he would invite us later on to see some slides in his room at the Pavillon des Provinces Françaises. Or perhaps I was the one harboring false ideas about him, after all. That evening, we ended up gathering around one of the cafeteria tables and I remember that one of the Moroccans and his Swedish girlfriend had danced to music from a transistor radio. Pacheco had danced, too. He was wearing a navy blue polo shirt, sunglasses, and his very close-cropped hair made him look even younger. I ended up doubting that this man could have been born on January 22, 1918.

The following week, Jacqueline and I were alone with Pacheco in one of the cafés opposite the Charléty stadium. His black leather suitcase was beside him.

“Would you do me a favor?” he asked.

He knew Jacqueline had a room on Boulevard Kellermann. Could he ask her to hold onto his suitcase for a few days? He had to take another trip for work and he didn’t want to leave it in his room at the Pavillon des Provinces Françaises, as the door didn’t lock: there were just some clothes and personal effects in the suitcase, of no value except to him.

He walked us to the building on Boulevard Kellermann, but he didn’t want to come up. In the courtyard, he handed me the suitcase.

“They’re sending me to Morocco again … But I’ll be back next week … I’ll send you a postcard.”

He remained standing in the middle of the courtyard. I sensed he wanted to tell me something but he couldn’t make up his mind. I had his suitcase in my hand. He stared at me fixedly with his vacant eyes.

“Can you do me another favor?”

He handed me a large brown envelope.

“These are my enrollment forms for the science faculty this year. They need to be delivered by hand to the Halle aux Vins campus before the end of the week.”

“You can count on us,” I said.

He shook our hands. Once again he raised his eyes to me. He turned his back on us suddenly, after giving a vague wave of goodbye. I watched him cross the boulevard and follow the wall of the SNECMA plant toward the Parc Montsouris.

Days passed, then months, without a word from him. He didn’t send us a postcard from Morocco as he’d promised. We stashed the valise in the closet of the room on Boulevard Kellermann. The enrollment forms for the Faculty of Sciences that he’d asked me to deliver were just an application to audit some classes. And that application was made out in the name of Philippe de Pacheco. Our friends at the Cité Universitaire didn’t seem surprised by his absence: he’ll be back someday, he’ll bring us cartons of American cigarettes … But they spoke of him with increasing indifference, as if about one of those hundreds of residents that you run into now and then in the halls, and that you might find yourself sitting with, by chance, at a table in the cafeteria.

One evening, I decided to open the suitcase. At a sidewalk table of the Café Babel at the edge of the Parc Montsouris, I had just run into the tall, dark fellow who worked for Air Maroc. I had asked if he had any news of Pacheco.

“I don’t think he’s ever coming back. He’s going to stay in Casablanca for good.”

“Do you have his address?”

“No.”

I was sure that wasn’t true. He knew much more than he wanted to let on.

“So, he’s decided to stay?”

“Yes.”

Back in our room, I took the black leather suitcase out of the closet. It was locked, but I jimmied it open with a knife.

Not much in the suitcase: The faded overcoat that the tramp I’d seen around the Cité Universitaire had worn that winter, two years ago. A pair of black corduroy trousers. In one of the coat pockets I found a very worn alligator-skin wallet, whose contents I emptied onto the kitchen table.

A ten-year-old identity card in the name of Philippe de Pacheco, born January 22, 1918. The address given on the card was 183 Rue Belliard, Paris 18. Folded in four, a draft of a letter, judging by the cross-outs and words inserted between the lines:

Paris, February 15, 1954

To the Director

Dear Sir,

I am presently at the welcome center of the Salvation Army, on the barge at Quai d’Austerlitz, opposite the train station. There is a dining hall, showers, and the dormitory has heating. Last autumn, I spent several weeks at the shelter on Rue Cantagrel where I did some manual chores. I have no special qualifications, other than I have been employed since the age of 15 in the food services field (cafés, restaurants, etc.).

Here is a list of my various employments, since the beginning:

Waiter: From 1933 to 1939: La Flotte restaurant, 118 Quai de l’Artois, Le Perreux. From 1940 (demobilized) to June 1942: Café Les Tamaris, 122 Rue d’Alésia (14th). From June 1942 to November 1943: Le Polo, 72 Avenue de la Grande-Armée. From November 1943 to August 1944: Chez Alexis restaurant, 47 Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette (9th). From 1949 to 1951: night watchman at the Pension Keppler, 9 Rue Keppler (16th).

I am still under an injunction banning me from the Seine Department and I’ve lost all my papers.

In hopes that you might be able to help me.

Respectfully,

Lombard

Apart from that letter, the wallet contained a page from a magazine, also folded in four: the article related the events of that night in April 1933 when Urbain and Gisèle T. had drifted from Montparnasse to Le Perreux before returning to Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques in the company of two other couples. Several sepia photos illustrated the magazine page. One of them showed the restaurant-nightclub in Le Perreux, another the entrance of 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques. At the top left, the photo of a very young man with slicked-down brown hair: I had no trouble recognizing the supposed Pacheco, despite the passage of time. The arch of the eyebrows, the straight nose, and the fleshy lips were the same. Next to the photo was a caption: “Charles Lombard, employee in a restaurant-nightclub in Le Perreux, had waited on the couple that evening.”

And so the man I had rubbed shoulders with for months was not named Philippe de Pacheco. He was a certain Charles Lombard, former café waiter, who frequented Salvation Army shelters, particularly the barge moored on the Quai d’Austerlitz. Why had he left me his suitcase? Did he want to teach me a lesson, show me that reality was more elusive than I thought? Unless he had simply abandoned these remains, certain of finding a new life in Casablanca or elsewhere.

Where and at what point had Lombard usurped Pacheco’s identity? The identity card dated from 1955. So Pacheco was still alive that year. The photo on the card showed the man I had known at the Cité Universitaire, whose real name was Charles Lombard, and who had artfully substituted it for Pacheco’s photo; it was even stamped by the Prefecture of Police. That evening, I went to 183 Rue Belliard, near the Porte de Clignancourt, and the concierge told me that there had never been an occupant of that building named Pacheco.

The law had no doubt given up on finding Pacheco. I learned that after a certain time, a decree of amnesty had been issued for the crime of “conspiring with the enemy.” In all likelihood, it was at that moment that Pacheco, emerging from the shadows, had procured himself an identity card.

I imagined him shuffling along, a vagrant silhouette. On the barge at the Quai d’Austerlitz, Lombard had been his bunkmate, had stolen his identity card. Moreover, anything was possible in that neighborhood, between the train station and the botanical gardens: night there is so deep, with its odors of wine and coal and its growling beasts, that a tramp could easily fall from the side of a barge into the Seine, could drown, and no one would notice.

Had Lombard been aware of Pacheco’s past when he swiped his identity card? In any case, he knew that Philippe de Pacheco called himself Philippe de Bellune and that he was a descendant of Maréchal Victor. I could still hear him telling me in his muffled voice in the Cité Universitaire cafeteria: “When I was younger, I used to go by the name Philippe de Bellune, but I had no real right to the title.”

In the dormitory of the barge at Austerlitz, Pacheco had opened up to Lombard and told him of his life. Why, on the identity card, was he said to be living at 183 Rue Belliard, in the eighteenth arrondissement? Was his mother still alive? Where? So many questions, the answers to which were no doubt buried in a file stored among countless others at the Prefecture of Police. One would also find the reasons for his internment at Dachau and his indictment for “conspiring with the enemy.” But how to access that file?

And what if Pacheco had continued to seek asylum in the various Salvation Army shelters? The loss of his identity card had meant little to him. He had already been dead a long time, as far as everyone was concerned … Maybe he’d never left the barge on the Quai d’Austerlitz.

Afternoons, he would wander along the river, or else he’d visit the Jardin des Plantes, then finish his day by sitting in the main hall of the Austerlitz station, before going back to the barge to have dinner in the dining hall and collapse on his bunk in the dormitory. And night fell on the quarter where my father, several years earlier, had also looked like a vagrant. Except that the Magasins Généraux, where they had locked him up with hundreds of others, was not the Salvation Army.

In his befuddled memory floated a few scraps of the past: The private hotel on Rue Greuze. The dog his grandparents had given him for Christmas. Meeting up with a girl with light brown hair. They had gone to the movies together, on the Champs-Elysées. In those days, he called himself Philippe de Bellune. The Occupation had come, bringing a host of people who also wore strange names and fake noble titles. Sherrer, alias “The Admiral,” Draga, Mme von Seckendorff, Baron de Kermanor …

I sat at a sidewalk table of one of the cafés facing the Charléty stadium. I constructed all the hypotheses concerning Philippe de Pacheco, whose face I didn’t even know. I took notes. Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.

Behind me, the jukebox was playing an Italian song. The stench of burned tires floated in the air. A girl was walking under the leaves of the trees along Boulevard Jourdan. Her blond bangs, cheekbones, and green dress were the only note of freshness on that early August afternoon. Why bother chasing ghosts and trying to solve insoluble mysteries, when life was there, in all its simplicity, beneath the sun?

When I was twenty, I would feel relieved when I passed from the Left Bank to the Right Bank of the Seine, crossing via the Pont des Arts. Night had already fallen. I turned back one last time to see the North Star shining above the dome of the Institut de France.

All the neighborhoods on the Left Bank were only provinces of Paris. The moment I reached the Right Bank, the air felt lighter.

Today I wonder what I could have been fleeing by crossing over the Pont des Arts. Perhaps the neighborhood I had known with my brother, which wasn’t the same without him: the school on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi; the town hall of the sixth arrondissement, where they handed out the scholastic prizes; the number 63 bus that we waited for in front of the Café de Flore, which took us to the Bois de Boulogne … For a long time, I felt uneasy walking on certain streets of the Left Bank. At this point, the area has become indifferent, as if it had been rebuilt stone by stone after a bombardment but had lost its soul. And yet, one summer afternoon, turning onto Rue Cardinale, I rediscovered in a flash something of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of my childhood, which resembled the old city of Saint-Tropez, without the tourists. From the church square, Rue Bonaparte sloped down toward the sea.

Once across the Pont des Arts, I walked beneath the archway of the Louvre, another domain with which I’d long been familiar. Beneath that archway, a musty odor of mildew, urine, and rotten wood wafted from the left side of the passage, where we’d never dared venture. Light fell from a filthy, cobweb-covered window, leaving in half-shadow heaps of rubble, wooden beams, and old gardening implements. We were sure that rats were hiding in there, and we hastened our steps to emerge into the fresh air of the Louvre courtyard.

In the four corners of that courtyard, grass spurted between the loose cobblestones. There, too, were heaps of rubble, building stones, and rusty iron rods.

The Cour du Carrousel was lined with stone benches, at the foot of the palace wings that framed the two little squares. There was no one on those benches. Except for us. And sometimes a vagrant. In the middle of the first square, on a pedestal so high that you could barely make out the statue, General Lafayette vanished into the stratosphere. The pedestal was surrounded by a lawn that they never trimmed. We could play and lie around in the tall grass without a groundskeeper ever coming to reprimand us.

In the second square, among the copses, were two bronze statues side by side: Cain and Abel. The fence surrounding them dated from the Second Empire. Visitors crowded around the museum entrance, but we were the only children to frequent those abandoned squares.

The most mysterious zone stretched to the left of the Carrousel gardens along the southern wing that ends at the Pavillon de Flore. It was a wide alley, separated from the gardens by a fence and lined with streetlamps. As in the Louvre courtyard, weeds grew among the cobblestones, but most of the stones had disappeared, leaving bare patches of ground. Farther up, in the recess formed by the palace wing, was a clock. And behind that clock, the cell of the Prisoner of Zenda. No stroller in the Carrousel gardens ventured down that alley. We spent entire afternoons playing amid the broken birdbaths and statues, the stones and dead leaves. The hands of the clock never moved. They forever struck five-thirty. Those immobile hands enveloped us in a deep, soothing silence. We only had to stay in the alley and nothing would ever change.

There was a police station in the courtyard of the Louvre, on the right-hand side of the archway that led out to Rue de Rivoli. A Black Maria was parked nearby. Officers in uniform stood in front of the half-open door, through which filtered a yellow light. Under the archway, to the right, was the main entrance to the station. For me, that was the border post that truly marked the passage from the Left Bank to the Right, and I felt my pocket to make sure I was carrying my identity card.

The arcades of Rue de Rivoli, along which ran the Magasins du Louvre. Place du Palais-Royal and its metro entrance. This led to a corridor featuring, in a row, small shoeshine booths with their leather seats, and shop windows displaying junk jewelry and souvenirs. At this point, one had only to choose the journey’s end: Montmartre to the north or the affluent neighborhoods to the west.

At Lamarck-Caulaincourt, you had to take an elevator to exit the station. The elevator was the size of a cable car, and in winter, when it had snowed in Paris, you could convince yourself it was taking you to the top of a ski slope.

Once outside, you walked up a flight of steps to reach Rue Caulaincourt. At the level of the first landing, on the flank of the left-hand building, was the door to the San Cristobal.

Inside reigned the silence and half-light of a marine grotto, on July afternoons when the heat emptied the streets of Montmartre. Windows with multicolored panes projected the sun’s rays onto the white walls and dark paneling. San Cristobal … The name of an island in the Caribbean, near Barbados and Jamaica? Montmartre, too, is an island that I haven’t seen in about fifteen years. I’ve left it behind me, intact, in the blue of time … Nothing has changed: the smell of fresh paint from the walls, and Rue de l’Orient, which will always remind me of the sloping streets of Sidi-Bou-Saïd.

It was with the Danish girl, the evening I ran away from school, that I went for the first time to the San Cristobal. We were sitting at a table in back, near the stained-glass windows.

“What will you have, old top?”

Over dinner, I tried talking to her about my future. Now that they’d no longer want me at school, could I still continue my studies? Or would I now have to find a job?

“Tomorrow is another day … Have some dessert.”

She didn’t seem to register the gravity of the situation. A tall blond fellow wearing a glen plaid suit came into the San Cristobal and headed for our table.

“Hiya, Tony.”

“Hi.”

She seemed delighted to see him. Her face lit up. He sat down next to us.

“Let me introduce you to a friend who was all alone this evening,” she said, pointing to me. “So I decided to take him to dinner.”

“Well done.”

He smiled at me.

“Does the young gentleman work in music?”

“No, no …” she said. “He ran away from school.”

He knitted his brow.

“That’s a bit awkward … Doesn’t he have any parents?”

“They’re traveling,” I stammered.

“Tony is going to call your school,” said the Danish girl. “He’ll tell them he’s your father and that you’re safely back home.”

“You really think that’s a good idea?” asked Tony.

He gently rolled the end of his cigarette along the edge of the ashtray.

“Go do it, Tony.”

She had taken an imperious tone and was threatening him with a wagging index finger.

“Okay …”

It was she who called information for the school’s telephone number, which she jotted down on a scrap of paper.

“Your turn now, Tony …”

“If you insist.”

He stood up and, with a casual gait, walked toward the phone booth.

“You’ll see … Tony will fix everything …”

After a moment, he reappeared at our table.

“Uh, well … They said my son had been expelled and that I have to go pick up his things before the end of the week …”

He shrugged, looking apologetic. I must suddenly have turned very pale. He laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t worry … They can’t bother you anymore … I told them you were home safe and sound.”

The three of us found ourselves on Rue Caulaincourt.

“I won’t be able to come to the movies with you,” the Danish girl said to me. “I have to spend a little time with Tony …”

She had planned to take me to the Gaumont-Palace to see Solomon and Sheba. She dug into her pocket and handed me a ten-franc bill.

“You’ll go to the Gaumont on your own, like a grown-up … And afterward, you’ll take the metro and come back to sleep at my house … Take the line that goes to Porte Dauphine and change at Etoile … Then the line to Nation and get off at Trocadéro.”

She gave me a smile. He shook my hand. The two of them got into his blue car, which disappeared around the first corner.

I didn’t go to the movies that evening. I walked around the neighborhood. Heading up Rue Junot, I came to the Château des Brouillards. I was sure that one day I would live around there.

I remember a car ride, five years later, from Pigalle to the Champs-Elysées. I had gone to see Claude Bernard in his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy and he offered to take me to the movies to see Lola or Adieu Philippine, which I remember fondly … It seems to me that the clouds, sun, and shadows of my twentieth year miraculously live on in those films. Normally we only spoke about books and movies, but that evening I alluded to my father and his misadventures under the Occupation: the warehouse on the Quai de la Gare, Pagnon, the Rue Lauriston gang … He looked over at me.

“A former sentinel from Rue Lauriston is now a doorman at a nightclub.”

How did he know that? I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask.

“Would you like to see him?”

We followed Boulevard de Clichy and stopped in Place Pigalle, next to the fountain. It was around nine in the evening.

“That’s him …”

He pointed out a man in a navy blue suit standing post in front of Les Naturistes.

At around midnight, we were walking up Rue Arsène-Houssaye, at the top of the Champs-Elysées, where Claude Bernard had parked his car. And we saw him again. He was still wearing his navy blue suit. And sunglasses. He stood immobile on the sidewalk, in the space between two neighboring cabarets, so that one couldn’t exactly tell which one he worked for.

I would have liked to ask him about Pagnon, but I felt awkward as soon as we passed in front of him. Later, I looked up his name among the other members of the gang. Two young men had served as lookouts on Rue Lauriston: a certain Jacques Labussière and a certain Jean-Damien Lascaux. Labussière, at the time, had lived on Rue de la Ronce in Ville-d’Avray and Lascaux somewhere near Villemomble. They had both been handed life sentences. Which one was he? I didn’t recognize him from the blurry photos that had appeared in the newspapers at the time of the trials.

I ran into him again, around 1970, on the sidewalk of Rue Arsène-Houssaye, still standing at the same place, with the same blue suit and the same sunglasses. A sentinel for all Eternity. And I wondered whether he wore those sunglasses because after thirty years his eyes had worn out from seeing so many people go into so many sleazy places …

Several days later, Claude Bernard had rummaged in a closet at the back of his bookstore and taken out this letter that he gave me, which dated from the Occupation. I’ve kept it all these years. Was it addressed to him?

My dearest love, my adored man, it is one in the afternoon; I’ve woken up very tired. Business not so good. I hooked up with a German officer at the Café de la Paix, brought him to the Chantilly, did two bottles: 140 francs. At midnight he was tired. I told him I lived a long ways away, so he rented me a room. He took one for himself. I got a kickback on both and he gave me 300 francs. That got me my 25 louis. He’d made a date with me for last night in the lobby of the Grand Hôtel, but at seven, when we were supposed to meet, he showed up all apologetic and showed me his orders to ship out to Brest. After my failed date, I said to myself, “I’ll go to Montparnasse to the Café de la Marine and see if Angel Maquignon is there.” I went. No Angel. I was about to take the subway home when two German officers picked me up and asked me to go with them, but I could see they were idiots so gave them the brush. I went back to Café de la Paix. Nothing doing. When Café de la Paix closed, I went to the lobby of the Grand Hôtel. Nada. I went to the bar at the Claridge. Bunch of officers having a staff meeting with their general. Nothing. I returned to Pigalle on foot. On the way, nothing. It was about one in the morning. I went into Pigalle’s, after checking in at the Royal and at the Monico, where there wasn’t anything. Nothing at Pigalle’s either. Heading back out, I ran into two hepcats who took me with them, we sank two bottles at Pigalle’s, so 140 francs, then we went to Barbarina, where I got another 140 francs. This morning at six-thirty I staggered home to bed, completely worn out, with 280 francs. I ran into Nicole at Barbarina, you should have seen her get-up … If you could have been there, my poor Jeannot, you’d have been ill …

Jacqueline

Who was that Angel Maquignon, whom this Jacqueline was going to meet at Café de la Marine? In the same café, a witness claimed to have seen Gisèle and Urbain T., that night in April when they’d mixed with bad company in Montparnasse.

The Champs-Elysées … It’s like that pond a British novelist talks about, at the bottom of which, in layered deposits, lie the echoes of the voices of every passerby who has daydreamed on its banks. The shimmering water preserves those echoes forever and, on quiet evenings, they all blend together … One evening in 1942, near the Biarritz cinema, my father was picked up by Inspector Schweblin and Permilleux’s stooges. Much later, toward the end of my childhood, I accompanied him to his meetings in the lobby of the Claridge and the two of us went to have dinner at the Chinese restaurant nearby, whose dining room was upstairs. Did he occasionally glance at the sidewalk across the avenue, where years earlier the Black Maria had been waiting to take him to the holding cell? I remember his office, in the ochre building with large bay windows at 1 Rue Lord-Byron. By following endless corridors, one could exit onto the Champs-Elysées. I suspect he had chosen that office for its double exit. He was always alone up there with a very pretty blonde, Simone Cordier. The telephone would ring. She’d pick up:

“Hello? … Who’s calling, please?”

Then, turning to my father, she whispered the name. And she added:

“Should I tell him you’re here, Albert?”

“No. I’m not here for anyone …”

And that’s how the afternoons passed. Empty. Simone Cordier typed letters. My father and I often went to the movies on the Champs-Elysées. He took me to see revivals of films he’d enjoyed. One of them featured the German actress Dita Parlo. After the movie, we walked down the avenue. He had told me in a confiding tone, which was unusual for him:

“Simone was a friend of Dita Parlo’s … I met the two of them at the same time.”

Then he’d fallen silent, and the silence between us lasted until Place de la Concorde, where he’d asked me about my studies.

Ten years later, I was looking for someone to type up my first novel for me. I had found Simone Cordier’s address. I called her. She seemed surprised I should still remember her after all that time, but she made an appointment to see me at her home on Rue de Belloy.

I entered the apartment, my manuscript under my arm. First she asked me for news of my father and I didn’t know what to answer, as I didn’t have any.

“So, you’re writing novels?”

I answered yes in a halting voice. She showed me into a space that must have been the living room, but it no longer had any furniture. The tan paint on the walls was peeling in spots.

“Let’s go to the bar,” she said.

And with an abrupt movement she pointed to a small white bar at the back of the room. The gesture had struck me at the time as rather offhanded, but now I realize how much shame and confusion it masked. She went to stand behind the bar. I put my manuscript down on it.

“Shall I pour you a whiskey?” she asked.

I didn’t dare say no. We were both standing, on opposite sides of the bar, in the dim light of a wall lamp. She poured herself a whiskey as well.

“Do you take it the same as me? Neat?”

“Sure.”

I hadn’t had whiskey since the Danish girl had given me some at Chez Malafosse, so long before …

She downed a large gulp.

“So you want me to type all that for you?”

She pointed to the manuscript.

“You know, I haven’t been a typist in a long time …”

She hadn’t aged. The same green eyes. The beautiful architecture of her face had remained intact: her forehead, the arch of her eyebrows, her straight nose. Only her skin had gone a bit florid.

“I’ll have to get back into the swing of it … I’ve gotten kind of rusty.”

I suddenly wondered where she could possibly type anything in that empty room. Standing, with the typewriter resting on the bar?

“If it’s a problem,” I said, “we can forget it …”

“No, no, it’s no problem …”

She poured herself another whiskey.

“I’ll get back into the swing of it … I’ll rent a typewriter.”

She slapped the flat of her hand down on the bar.

“You leave me three pages and come back in two weeks … Then you can bring me three more pages … And so on and so forth … Sound all right to you?”

“Sure.”

“Another whiskey?”

After leaving Simone Cordier’s apartment, I didn’t immediately take the metro at Boissière. Night had fallen and I wandered aimlessly around the quarter.

I had left her three pages of my manuscript, without harboring much hope that she’d type them. She had shrugged her shoulders when I’d said I hadn’t heard from my father in five years. Apparently, nothing could surprise her about “Albert,” not even his disappearance.

It had rained. A smell of gasoline and wet leaves hovered in the air. Suddenly, I thought of Pacheco. I imagined him walking on the same sidewalk. I had gotten as far as the Hôtel Baltimore. I knew that one evening he’d gone to meet someone at that hotel and I wondered what sort of person he might have seen there. Perhaps Angel Maquignon.

The only information I’d ever gleaned about Pacheco had come by chance, in the course of a conversation, at Claude Bernard’s house on the Ile des Loups. We were having dinner with an antiques dealer from Brussels whom he’d introduced as his associate. By what circuitous path had we come, that man and I, to speak of the duc de Bellune, then of Philippe de Bellune, alias de Pacheco? The name rang a bell with him. When he was very young, he had known, on a beach in Belgium, at Heist near Zee-brugge, a certain Felipe de Pacheco. The latter lived with his grandparents, in a dilapidated villa on the dike. He claimed to be Peruvian.

Felipe de Pacheco frequented the Hôtel du Phare, where the owner, who had been a diva at the Liège Opera, sometimes gave recitals for the evening clientele. He was in love with her daughter, a very pretty blonde named Lydia. He spent his nights drinking beer with his friends from Brussels. He slept until noon. He had abandoned his studies and was living by his wits. His grandparents were too old to keep an eye on him.

And several years later, in Paris, my interlocutor had again met this boy in a drama class, where he was calling himself Philippe de Bellune. He was taking the course in the company of a girl with light brown hair. He was a dark young man with a spot on one eye. One day, this Philippe de Bellune announced that he’d just found a well-paying job through the want ads.

They had never been seen again. Neither Philippe de Bellune nor the girl with light brown hair. It must have been the winter of 1942.

I scoured the job offers placed in the newspapers that winter:

Several young persons needed for lucrative work, immediate payment, no special qualifications required. Write to Delbarre or Etève, Hôtel Baltimore, 88-bis Avenue Kléber, 16th. Or come to that address after 7 p.m.

I recall a Hôtel de Belgique on Boulevard Magenta, not far from the Gare du Nord. It’s the area where my father spent his childhood. And my mother arrived in Paris for the first time at the Gare du Nord.

Today, I felt like going back to that neighborhood, but the Gare du Nord seemed so far away to me that I gave up. Hôtel de Belgique … I was sixteen years old when my mother and I washed up one summer in Knokke-le-Zoute, like two drifters. Some friends of hers were kind enough to take us in.

One evening, the two of us were walking along the large dike at Albert-Plage. We had left behind the casino and an area of dunes past which began the dike of Heist-sur-Mer. Did we pass by the Hôtel du Phare? On our way back, via Avenue Elisabeth, I had noticed several abandoned villas, one of which might have belonged to Felipe de Pacheco’s grandparents.

Last night, I accompanied my daughter to the neighborhood around Les Gobelins. Heading back, the taxi took Rue de la Santé, where a café of the type that used to carry a sign saying WOOD COAL SPIRITS was bathed in green light. On Boulevard Arago, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the dark and interminable wall of La Santé prison. It was there that they used to set up the guillotine, back when. Once again I thought of my father, his release from the warehouse on the Quai de la Gare, and of Pagnon, who no doubt had come to fetch him that night. I knew that Pagnon himself had been imprisoned at La Santé in 1941, before being freed by “Henri,” the head of the Rue Lauriston gang.

The taxi had reached Denfert-Rochereau and taken the avenue that runs past Saint-Vincent-de-Paul hospital, the Observatoire, and the Bureau des Longitudes. It headed for the Seine. In my dreams, I often take this route: I emerge from a place of detention that might be La Santé or the warehouse on the Quai de la Gare. It’s night. Someone is waiting for me, in a large automobile with leather seats. We leave this neighborhood of hospitals, convents, wine markets, leather markets, and prisons, and head for the Seine. The instant we touch the Right Bank, after crossing the Pont du Carrousel and the grand archways of the Louvre, I breathe a sigh of relief. I have nothing more to fear. We’ve left the danger zone behind us. I’m perfectly aware it’s only a respite. Later on, I’ll be called to account. I feel a certain guilt, the reason for which remains vague: a crime to which I was an accomplice or witness, I couldn’t really say. And I hope this ambiguity will spare me from punishment. What does this dream correspond to in real life? To the memory of my father who, under the Occupation, had also experienced an ambiguous situation: arrested in a roundup by French detectives without knowing what he was guilty of, and freed by a member of the Rue Lauriston gang? The latter used several deluxe automobiles that their former owners had abandoned in the exodus of June 1940. “Henri” drove a white Bentley that had belonged to the duc de Cadaval, and Pagnon a Lancia that the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, departing for America, had left with a garage mechanic on Rue La Boétie. And it was no doubt in Remarque’s purloined Lancia that Pagnon had come for my father. How strange it must have been to walk out of the “hole”—as my father called it — and find yourself in one of those automobiles that smelled of leather, slowly crossing Paris toward the Right Bank after curfew … But sooner or later, everyone is called to account.

That dream I often have of a car ride from the Left Bank to the Right, in unsettled circumstances, is something that I, too, experienced, when I ran away from school in January 1960, age fourteen and a half. The bus I’d taken at La Croix de Berny dropped me off at the Porte d’Orléans, in front of the Café de la Rotonde, which occupied the ground floor of one of the buildings massed along the periphery. On the rare occasions when we were let out for a day, we had to assemble on Monday morning at seven in front of the Café de la Rotonde and wait for the bus that would bring us back to school. It was a kind of luxuriously appointed correctional facility for delinquents, castoffs from rich families, illegitimate children born to women they used to call “tarts,” or children abandoned during a trip to Paris like unwanted luggage: such as my bunkmate, the Brazilian Mello Rodrigues, who hadn’t heard from his parents in over a year … In order to teach us the discipline that our “families” hadn’t instilled in us, the administration practiced a military academy — style rigor: parade marches, morning flag salutes, corporal punishment, standing at attention, evening inspections of the dormitories, countless laps around the fitness trail on Thursday afternoons …

That Monday, January 18, 1960, I followed the reverse path: from the Café de la Rotonde — so lugubrious on Monday mornings in winter, when we went back to the “hole” via Montrouge and Malakoff — I took the metro to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. At Chez Malafosse, the Danish girl said:

“A whiskey for Old Top here …”

The waiter, behind the bar, smiled and said:

“We don’t serve alcohol to minors, Mademoiselle.”

She let me take a sip from her glass. The whiskey had a particularly acrid taste, but it gave me the courage to confess that I couldn’t go home, as my parents were both away until the following month.

“So you just have to go back to your school,” said the one wearing dark glasses and smoking yellow cigarettes.

I explained that that was impossible: if a student ran away, the punishment was always immediate expulsion. They’d refuse to keep me.

“And there’s nobody home at all?”

“Nobody.”

“And can’t we get hold of your parents?”

“No.”

“Don’t you have the key to your house?”

“No.”

“I’ll take care of Old Top,” said the Danish girl.

She rested her hand on my shoulder. We took our leave of the others and walked out of Chez Malafosse. Her car was parked a little farther on, along the river, past the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: a navy blue Peugeot 203 with red leather seats. I knew that car. I’d seen it in the neighborhood several times, in front of the Louisiane and Montana hotels.

I was sitting next to her on the front seat. She peeled away from the curb.

“Someone is going to have to look after you,” she said in a calm voice.

We followed the quays and crossed the Seine via the Pont de la Concorde. On the Right Bank, I felt better, as if the Seine were a border that protected me from a savage hinterland. We were far from the Café de la Rotonde, La Croix de Berny, and the school … But I couldn’t help thinking of the future with anxiety, as I felt I’d done something irreparable.

“Do you think it’s serious?” I asked her.

“What’s serious?”

She turned to me.

“No, of course not, old top … It’ll work out …”

Her Danish accent reassured me. We drove alongside the Cours la Reine, and I told myself I could at least rely on her.

“They’ll tell the police.”

“Are you afraid of the police?”

She smiled and her periwinkle eyes rested on me.

“Don’t you worry, old top …”

The soft, husky rustle of her voice dissipated my anxiety. We had arrived at Place de l’Alma and were driving along the avenue that leads to Trocadéro. It was the route the 63 bus followed when we took it, my brother and I, to go to the Bois de Boulogne. When it was nice out, we stood on the platform.

She did not turn right, onto the tree-shaded avenue that the number 63 took. She parked the car in front of the large modern buildings at the end of Avenue Paul-Doumer.

“This is where I live.”

On the ground floor, we took a long hallway lit by neons. A silhouette in a raincoat was waiting at her door. A tall, dark man with a fine mustache. A cigarette was hanging from the corner of his mouth. He, too, was someone I’d seen around the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

“I didn’t have the key,” he said.

He smiled at me, looking mildly surprised.

“He’s a pal of mine,” she said, pointing to me.

“Nice to meet you.”

He shook my hand. She said to me:

“Go take a walk, old top … Come back in an hour … This evening, I’ll take you to a restaurant and afterward we’ll go to the movies …”

She opened her door and the two of them went in. Then she poked her head through the doorway.

“Don’t forget the number of the room when you come back. It’s 23 …”

With her finger she showed me the figure 23, in gilded metal on the pale wood.

“Come back in an hour … This evening, we’ll go have a good tuck-in in Montmartre, at the San Cristobal …”

Her Danish accent was even softer, more caressing because of the outdated slang expression.

She shut the door. For a moment, I stood frozen in the hall. It took a huge effort not to knock. I left the building and walked with slow, regular steps, for I could feel the panic rising in me. I thought I’d never manage to cross the traffic circle at Trocadéro. I talked myself out of entering the first police station I saw and confessing my crime. But no, it was absurd. They’d put me in a real reform school, or what they called a “supervised environment.” Could I really trust the Danish girl? I should have stayed on the sidewalk of Avenue Paul-Doumer, to make sure she didn’t leave. The dark-haired man in the raincoat who’d gone into her place might persuade her not to look after me. Room 23. I mustn’t forget the number. Still three-quarters of an hour to go. And if she wasn’t there, I’d wait for her at the door of her building, keeping out of sight until she returned.

I tried to reassure myself by tossing all those ideas around in my head. On the other side of the traffic circle was the stop for the 63 bus. Did I have enough time to ride as far as the Bois de Boulogne and back again? I still had ten francs. But I was scared at the thought of finding myself all alone on that bus, and all alone on the lawn at La Muette and next to the lake, those places where I’d used to go, only a few years before, with my brother. Instead I went onto the esplanade that overlooks Paris. Then I walked down the sloping alleys of the garden that were bathed in winter light. No one was around. I felt better. Above me were the huge windows and cornice of the Palais de Chaillot. It felt as if the auditoriums and galleries inside were as empty as the gardens. I went to sit on a bench. Almost at once, my immobility brought that panic back to the surface. So I stood up again and continued down the alleys, toward the Seine.

I ended up in front of the Aquarium. I bought a ticket. It was like going into a subway station. It was dark at the bottom of the steps, but that comforted me. In the room where I then found myself, only the tanks were lit. Little by little, in the bosom of those shadows, I regained my peace of mind. Nothing mattered. I was far removed from everything: my parents, my school, the commotion of life, in which the only good memory was that soft, murmuring voice with its Danish accent … I approached the tanks. The fish were as brightly colored as the bumper cars of my childhood: pink, turquoise, emerald … They made no noise. They slid along the glass partitions. They opened their mouths without emitting a sound, but now and again bubbles would rise to the surface of the water. They would never call me to account.

There, on the sidewalk of Avenue Henri-Martin, it occurred to me that Sunday evenings in winter are as depressing in the affluent west-side neighborhoods as they are around the Ursulines and on the glacial square of the Panthéon.

I felt pressure in the pit of my stomach, a flower whose petals swelled and became suffocating. I was pinned to the ground. Fortunately, the presence of my daughters kept me anchored in the present. Otherwise, all the old Sunday evenings, with their returns to boarding school, the crossing of the Bois de Boulogne, the long-gone Neuilly riding club, the night lights in the dormitory — those Sundays would have drowned me in their odor of rotting leaves. A few lit windows in the building façades were themselves night lights that had been left burning for thirty years, in empty apartments.

The memory of Jacqueline surged from the rain puddles and lights burning to no purpose in the apartment windows. I don’t know whether she’s still alive somewhere. The last time I saw her was twenty-four years ago, in the main departure hall of the Westbahnhof in Vienna. I was about to leave that city and return to Paris, but she’d decided to stay. She probably remained awhile longer in our room on the Taubstummengasse, behind the Karlskirche, and then I suppose that she, too, must have headed off for new adventures.

I wonder where certain people are today, whom I knew in that same period. I try to imagine in which city I might possibly run into them. I’m certain they’ve left Paris for good. And I think of Rome, where one finally ends up, and where time has stopped like on the clock in the Carrousel gardens in my childhood.

That summer, we’d found ourselves for several months in another foreign city, Vienna, and we were even planning to stay there forever. One night, near the Graben, we had gone into a café that one accessed through the main entrance of an apartment building. The foyer led to a large room with a grayish floor that looked like a dance school or the disused lobby of a hotel, or even a train station cafeteria. Light shone from neon tubes on the walls.

I had discovered this place by chance during a stroll. We sat at one of the tables arranged in rows, widely separated from each other. There were only three or four customers talking among themselves in low voices.

Of course, it was I who’d dragged Jacqueline to the Café Rabe that evening. But that girl, who was exactly my age, had a knack for attracting ghosts. In Paris, on the Sunday evening when I’d noticed her for the first time, she was in such strange company … And now, at the Café Rabe, who would we meet because of her?

A man came in. He was wearing a tweed jacket. He walked with a heavy limp to the counter at the back of the room, helped himself to a pitcher of water and a glass. With his broken gait, he came to sit at the table next to ours.

I wondered if he was the café owner. He must have overheard a few words of our conversation, for he turned toward us:

“Are you French?”

He had a very slight accent. He smiled. He introduced himself:

“Rudy Hiden …”

I had already heard that name without knowing whom it belonged to. His face with its regular features could have been a movie actor’s. At the time, his name, Rudy, had struck me: it was my brother’s name. And he evoked romantic images: Mayerling, Valentino’s funeral, an Austrian emperor who suffered from melancholia in some long-distant past.

We exchanged a few polite words with Rudy Hiden, like travelers who don’t know each other but happen to be sitting at the same table in the restaurant car. He told us he had lived in Paris, that he hadn’t been back in a long time, and that he missed the city very much. He bade us farewell with a ceremonious movement of his head when we left the Café Rabe.

Later, I learned that he’d been the greatest goalie in the history of soccer. I tried to find photos of him and of all his Austrian friends with melodious names who’d been on the Vienna Wunderteam, and who had dazzled the spectators in the stadiums with their grace. Rudy Hiden had had to quit soccer. He had opened a nightclub in Paris, on Rue Magellan. Then a bar on Rue de la Michodière. He had broken his leg. He had returned to Vienna, his native city, where he lived as a vagrant.

I can still see him under the neon lights of the Café Rabe, coming toward us with his broken gait. Is it only by chance that I came across this letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, which reminds me of him? “I honestly think that all the prizefighters, actors, writers who live by their own personal performances ought to have managers in their best years. The ephemeral part of the talent seems, when it is in hiding so apart from one, so ‘otherwise,’ that it seems it ought to have some better custodian than the poor individual with whom it lodges and who is left with the bill.”

Which he will settle at the Café Rabe.

I had met Jacqueline one Sunday evening, in Paris, in the sixteenth. A curious arrondissement. Claude Bernard, for instance, whose police file I’d like to peruse to learn more about the man I met at nineteen, often dined at restaurants in that quarter. The members of the Rue Lauriston gang as well. Pagnon lived in a deluxe furnished apartment at 48-bis Rue des Belles-Feuilles. He frequented the riding club in Neuilly and even the grounds of the Cercle de l’Etrier in the Bois de Boulogne, which he had requisitioned one afternoon through “Henri” so that his mistress could go horseback riding all on her own, without being bothered by anyone …

Rack my brains as I might for memories of the sixteenth arrondissement, I find only empty apartments, as if everything has been repossessed — like in Simone Cordier’s living room.

That Sunday evening, it was raining. It was in October or November. Claude Bernard had arranged to meet me for dinner in a restaurant on Rue de la Tour. The day before, I’d sold him the complete works of Balzac — the Veuve Houssiaux edition. I arrived first. The only customer. I waited in a small room with light wood paneling. Photos of jockeys and riding instructors, most of them inscribed, decorated the walls.

Three people made a noisy entrance: a blond man of about fifty, tall and well built, wearing a hunting jacket and an ascot; a dark-haired man who was much younger and shorter than the first; and a girl about my age, with chestnut hair and light-colored eyes, wrapped in a fur coat. The restaurant owner made a beeline toward them, a smile on his face.

“What’s new?”

Short-and-dark gave him a smug up-and-down look.

“Vierzon to Paris in an hour and a quarter … There was nobody on the road … Averaged a hundred miles an hour … These two were scared witless.”

He nodded toward the girl and the blond man in the riding jacket. The latter shrugged.

“He thinks he’s a racing driver. He forgets I was racing with Wimille and Sommer when I was twenty …”

The three men burst out laughing. As for the girl, she seemed to be sulking. The owner showed them to a table facing mine. He hadn’t noticed my presence. The dark-haired man had his back to me. The other one was seated next to the girl, on the bench. She hadn’t removed her fur. The telephone rang. The phone was on the bar, to my right.

“It’s for you, Monsieur …”

The owner held out the receiver to me. I got up. The eyes of all three of them were on me. The dark-haired one had even turned around. Claude Bernard apologized for not being able to join me. He was “stuck”—he said — in his house on the Ile des Loups “owing to an unexpected visit.” He asked if I had enough on me to pay for dinner. Fortunately, I’d kept the three thousand francs from the sale of the Balzac in the inner pocket of my jacket. When I hung up, my eyes met the girl’s. I didn’t dare leave the restaurant without ordering, as I would have had to ask for my coat, which a waiter had put in the cloakroom at the back of the restaurant.

I returned to that place several times. With Claude Bernard, or else alone. Claude Bernard was surprised at my constancy in going to Rue de la Tour. I wanted to know more about that girl who didn’t take off her fur coat and who always looked sullen.

Every Sunday evening, they made their entrance at around nine-thirty. They were in a group of four or five, sometimes more. They were loud, and the owner treated them with affable deference. The girl sat at their table, very stiff, and always next to the blond in the riding jacket. She never said a word. She seemed absent. Her fur coat clashed with the youthfulness of her face.

“Vierzon to Paris in an hour and a quarter … There was nobody on the road …” The echo of those words, which I’d heard that first Sunday, is now so faint that I have to strain my ears. The years have covered them over with static. Vierzon … They were returning from Sologne, where the blond in the hunting jacket owned a chateau and property. He bore the title of marquis. Later, I learned his name, which conjured up the wasp-waisted pages of the Valois court and Morgane le Fay, from which his family claimed to descend.

But I had in front of me only a man with a heavyset face and coarse voice. I felt an unease similar to the one that gripped me a few years later, when I overheard a conversation between forwarding agents and meatpacking truckers at an inn near Paris: they were talking about the poachers who supplied them with deer and venison, about clandestine slaughters and nocturnal deliveries to horse butchers’ shops; the places where they operated were the ones whose graceful names had been sung by Gérard de Nerval: Crépy-en-Valois, Mortefontaine, Loisy, La Chapelle-en-Serval …

So they were returning from Sologne. The marquis was master of the hounds for a hunting rally that “unleashed”—I had caught that word from their mouths — in the Vierzon forest. The rally was called the “Sologne — Menehou Pond.” And I imagined that pond at the end of a forest path, at sunset. In the distance, a fanfare of hunting horns tugged at my heart. I couldn’t take my eyes off the still waters with their reddish reflections, the water lilies, the bulrushes. Little by little, the surface of the water turned black, and I saw that girl, as a child, at the edge of the pond in Menehou …

After several Sundays, the restaurant owner began to recognize me. I had taken advantage of a moment when the others hadn’t yet arrived for dinner, and I’d asked him who that girl in the fur coat was, with regard to the marquis whom she always seemed to be with and who always sat next to her. “A poor relation,” he’d said with a shrug.

A poor relation, certainly born, like the marquis, into a very old, aristocratic family whose origins were lost in the mists of time and in the depths of the forests of the Ile de France and Sologne … I was certain she’d spent her childhood in a boarding school in Bourges, with the Ursuline sisters. She was the only descendant of one of those extinct families with no male heirs, the kind that people called “overseas half-breeds,” who remained in Constantinople, Greece, and Sicily for centuries after the Crusades. Much later, one of her ancestors had returned to Sologne, their native land, to discover a ruined castle on the banks of the Menehou pond, and linden trees, in whose shade, in summer, large butterflies gently swirled.

One Sunday evening, she was being even sulkier than usual, in her fur coat. From my table I watched the marquis’s attempts to cheer her up: he tickled her chin with his index finger, but she turned her head away sharply, as if she’d been startled by the touch of something viscous. I shared her disgust: the marquis’s hands were thick and ruddy, the hands of a strangler that called to mind the title of a documentary, The Blood of Beasts. That memory joins with the memory of the conversation overheard between agents and meat shippers who crisscrossed the country of Nerval. How dare that hulking blond in his hunting jacket soil such a delicate face with his hand? Claude Bernard, who one Sunday had noticed my interest in the girl, had kindly remarked, “She looks like Joan Fontaine, my favorite actress …”

The compliment had struck me as only half-right. Joan Fontaine was English, whereas for me that girl represented the ideal Frenchwoman, as I imagined her at the time.

That evening, I noticed there was a larger group at their table than on other Sundays. I could name names: a certain Jean Terrail, whom Claude Bernard had recognized among them the previous week, a dark-haired fellow who, he said, managed a hotel on Rue François-1er. Now, among the information I had gathered about Pagnon, there was this: “In 1943, personally swindled 300,000 francs in German marks that had been entrusted to him for sale by a Mr. Jean Terrail.” The world to which these people belonged revived some memories from childhood: it was my father’s world. Marquis and captains of industry. Gentlemen of fortune. Prison fodder. Angel Maquignon. I rescue them from the void one final time before they sink back into it forever.

Today, those Sunday evening diners seem as far away in time as if a century had elapsed. All that lively company is dead. My only interest in them is that they formed around Jacqueline a jewel case of decaying velvet … Vierzon to Paris in an hour and a quarter … There was nobody on the road … The restaurant door opens onto her, and from outside wafts an odor of wet earth and linden.

In the middle of dinner, she had suddenly stood up. The marquis had tried to detain her by taking her shoulder. But she had left their table and listlessly drifted out of the restaurant. The marquis hadn’t turned a hair. He had feigned indifference and forced himself to take part in the general conversation.

I hadn’t yet started my meal. I stood up in turn. An impulse pushed me outside. I had been watching her for weeks, and our eyes had barely met.

She was about ten yards ahead of me, on the sidewalk. She was walking with that same indolent step. I quickly caught up with her. She turned around. I remained speechless. I managed to stammer out:

“Have you … abandoned your friends?”

“Yes. Why did you ask me that?”

She raised the collar of her fur coat and pulled it tight it around her throat. Her ironic gaze was resting on me.

“I think I know one of your friends, by sight …”

She started walking again and I followed along, fearing she’d say something cutting. But she seemed to find it natural that I should remain at her side. We turned into that dead-end alley lined with houses that they call Avenue Rodin.

“So, you know one of my friends. Which one?”

It started to rain. We took shelter under the porch of the first building.

“The blond gentleman,” I said. “The marquis de something.”

She smiled at me.

“You mean the old prick?”

Her voice was soft, slightly indistinct, and she had pronounced those two words without stressing them. I suddenly realized that I’d been all wrong about her and that my imagination had led me astray. It was better this way. For me, from then on, she was simply Jacqueline of Avenue Rodin.

We waited for the rain to let up and then we walked to her place. Straight ahead, down Rue de la Tour. Then we followed Boulevard Delessert, in that area of Passy built in tiers that descend toward the river. A steep flight of steps brought us to a little street that led onto the quay. The elevator was out of service. Two adjoining rooms. In one of them, a large bed with a padded satin headboard.

“The old prick is going to show up. Is it all right with you if we turn out the light?”

Still in that soft, composed voice, as if it were a matter of course. We sat side by side on the sofa, in the half-light. She hadn’t removed her fur coat. She put her face close to mine.

“And you, what were you doing all those Sunday evenings in the restaurant?”

She had taken me by surprise. A mocking smile played about her lips. She leaned her head on my shoulder and stretched out her legs on the sofa. I caught the scent of her hair. I didn’t dare move. I heard the sound of an engine down below.

“That must be the old prick,” she whispered.

She got up and went to look out the window. The engine shut off. I went to look as well. It was raining very hard. A large, black English automobile was parked along the sidewalk. The marquis was standing immobile in front of the building. He wasn’t wearing an overcoat or raincoat. She left the window and went back to sit on the sofa.

“What is he doing?” she asked.

“Nothing. He’s standing in the rain.”

But after a moment, he headed for the door of the building. I heard his heavy step on the stairs. He gave two sharp knocks. She didn’t move from the sofa. He started pounding on the door. It was as if he was trying to break it down. Then silence again. His heavy step grew fainter on the stairs.

I hadn’t moved from the window. Under the pouring rain, he crossed the street and went to lean against the retaining wall of the steps we had walked down shortly before. And he stood there, unmoving, his back against the wall, his head raised toward the building façade. Rainwater poured onto him from the top of the steps, and his jacket was drenched. But he did not move an inch. At that moment a phenomenon occurred for which I’m still trying to find an explanation: had the street lamp at the top of the steps suddenly gone out? Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain, from falling on him so heavily, had dissolved him, the way water dilutes a fresco that hasn’t had time to dry properly. As hard as I pressed my forehead against the glass and peered at the dark gray wall, no trace of him remained. He had vanished in that sudden way that I’d later notice in other people, like my father, which leaves you so puzzled that you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed.

Spring came early this year. It was very warm on March 18 and 19, 1990. Overnight, the buds blossomed into leaves on the chestnut trees in the Luxembourg. In front of the entrance to the gardens, on Rue Guynemer, multicolored buses stop and let out Japanese tourists. In rows, they follow an alley to the Statue of Liberty that rises at the edge of a lawn, a miniature replica of the one in New York.

A short while ago, I was sitting on a bench, not far from that statue. A man with silver hair wearing a blue suit walked at the head of a group of Japanese and, in front of the statue, gave them, with movements of his arm, a few explanations in approximate English. I mixed with the group. I didn’t take my eyes off that man; I focused on the timbre of his voice. I thought I recognized the false Pacheco from the time of the Cité Universitaire. He was carrying a travel bag with the TWA airlines logo on it. He had aged. Was it really he? The same tanned skin, as when he’d returned from Casablanca, and the same eyes that were so blue they were empty.

I moved closer to him. I was tempted to tap him on the shoulder and interrupt his spiel. And say, holding out my hand, “Monsieur Lombard, I presume?”

The Japanese took a few photos of the statue, and their group made an about-face down the alley that leads to the gate on Rue Guynemer. The man with the silver hair and blue suit led the way. They climbed into the bus that was waiting at the sidewalk. The man counted the Japanese as they passed in front of him.

He climbed on in turn and sat next to the driver. He was holding a microphone. The Jardins du Luxembourg was just one stop and they had all of Paris to visit. I wanted to follow them on that glorious morning, harbinger of spring, and be just a simple tourist. No doubt I would have rediscovered a city I had lost and, through its avenues, the feeling I’d once had of being light and carefree.

At the age of twenty, I had left for Vienna with Jacqueline of Avenue Rodin. I remembered the days preceding our departure and an afternoon at the Porte d’Italie. I had visited a small kennel at the end of Avenue d’Italie. In one of the cages, a terrier was watching me with black eyes, head slightly cocked, ears raised, as if he wanted to start a conversation and not miss a single word of what I would say. Or else, he was simply waiting for me to deliver him from his prison — which I did after a few moments’ hesitation. Why not take a dog to Vienna?

I sat down with him at a sidewalk café table. It was June. They hadn’t yet dug the foundations for the périphérique, which gives such a feeling of enclosure. Back then, the gates of Paris were all in vanishing perspectives; the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots. And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner.