I NEEDED A STORY FOR A MOVIE, and I needed to find a French screenwriter for Marie-Laure’s meeting. And I needed one who wouldn’t be asking for money up front, which precluded my doing it through an agent. It occurred to me that I might be able to adapt a book myself, lifting the dialogue verbatim and transferring the descriptive action from the past to the present tense (this is how John Huston adapted The Maltese Falcon, or rather how his secretary did it; before leaving town for the weekend, he gave her the novel and told her to type it up in screenplay format, and upon his return he found the result perfectly filmable). But I needed to find a book, a title obscure enough that its author would accept a minimal option or none at all on the promise of a later payday. And I did have every reason to believe that there would be a payoff at some later date. I wandered off from the hotel with the idea of a walk. I circled the courtyard of the Louvre and the Tuileries and headed across the rue de Rivoli to the arcade and walked along, acknowledging in my amiable but unapproachable manner the cries of recognition from my fellow flaneurs.
