Speech fails, then consciousness, and before another five minutes have passed, he has fallen across his straw pallet—at a cumbersome tangent, like a dropped ceiling beam. All that’s left to do is to remove his boots before bidding him good night. Over the next two days, I do all I can to resume our conversation. Outwardly he is all eagerness. Inside, something balks, and no manner of private hints—the Temple, the Wise Athenian—will quite uncork him. The best I can secure is a promise, vaguely worded, to take me to “the archives” someday. Where these archives are, what they contain…none of this can be determined, hard as I ply him. Through all of Saturday and Sunday, I wait for the clouds to pass. Monday comes round with nothing more to show for my labors. Only the old routine, waiting to be shouldered. I leave the house at the same time: nine-fifteen. I am bound for the same place: the École de Médecine. The one difference is this. When I’m twenty or so paces from my door, a fiacre rolls up.
