I lost no time in forming other attachments, however, and about a month went by without my having felt any particular desire to resume my funereal fling. But nor did I forget her. The memory of her haunted me like some unsolved mystery, a psychological teaser, one of those nagging little puzzles you can’t leave alone. One day, for some inexplicable reason, I wondered whether, if I went back to Montmartre Cemetery again, I might bump into her, and decided to return.

I walked around for a long time but there was no one there apart from the usual sort of people who visit the place, mourners who have not yet severed all ties with their dead. At the grave of the captain killed at Tonkin no one mourned over the marble slab, no flowers lay there, no wreaths. However, as I was walking through another district of the city of the departed I suddenly saw a couple, a man and a woman in deep mourning, coming towards me down a narrow avenue lined with crosses. To my amazement as they approached, I recognized the woman. It was she! Seeing me she blushed. As I brushed past her she gave me a tiny signal, the merest glance, but conveying in the clearest possible way both: “Don’t show you know me,” and “Come back and see me, darling.”

The man with her was about fifty, distinguished-looking and well-dressed, with the rosette of the Légion d’honneur10 in his lapel. He was supporting her just as I had done when we both left the cemetery that day.

I went off, flabbergasted by what I had just seen and trying to imagine what tribe of creatures she belonged to, hunting as she obviously did on this sepulchral terrain. Was she a single prostitute who had struck on the brilliant idea of frequenting graveyards and picking up unhappy men still haunted by the loss of a wife or a mistress and troubled by the memory of past caresses? Was she unique? Or were there more like her? Was it a professional speciality to work the cemetery like the street? The loved ones of those laid to rest! Or was she alone in having conceived the psychologically sound idea of exploiting the feelings of amorous nostalgia awakened in these mournful venues?

I was longing to know whose widow she had chosen to be that day.’

THE NECKLACE

She was one of those charming, pretty young women who seem to have been born by some cruel quirk of fate into quite the wrong social rank: in this instance, the minor bureaucracy. She had no dowry and no expectations, and it was therefore unlikely that any rich or distinguished gentleman would get to know her, understand or love her, still less make her his wife. Under the circumstances she settled, for a husband, on a petty clerk in the Ministry of Education.