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My rotten experience in these past few days and nights (a morass of one hundred and ninety-two dream- and trauma-choked hours of powerless fury, disappointment, and despair over the contents of a half dozen suitcases, bags, and cardboard boxes full of disordered papers) teaches me that I cannot be precise enough in my notes:

I write this in Room 26 of the Hôtel Épicure on the rue du Roi Philibert, a filthy little side street off the avenue des Ternes, veering acutely from the end of the last line of houses on the avenue and forming a sharp angle with the place des Ternes.

At the point where it crosses the avenue, a couple of vegetable carts supply Parisian coloring: the color splotches that we (not unversed in art history) experience as Impressionistic; and, in the spider-legged spokes of the cartwheels, that certain French filminess of all kitsch practitioners since Dufy:

—a piece of so-called genuine and typical Paris, which, in folkloristic sentimentality, we ramble after, seeking it in more and more hidden, more and more remote corners, in order to feel the melancholy of watching it disappear here too—whereas it is no longer so much Parisian as just suburbanly colorful and provincially contemplative and characteristic of a vanished era that has produced a similar atmosphere everywhere in the once not yet metastatically proliferating metropoles and that survives most tenaciously where the dreadful development is slower, so that sporadic impressions caught today in Copenhagen or Turino often seem more Parisian than Paris itself—

A so-called picturesque nook, then. During the day, garbage is dumped on the sidewalk. Once in a blue week, a pack of Chaplinesque slapstickers in baggy overalls shows up, municipal street cleaner’s caps on their curly hair, cigarette butts behind their ears, and gigantic, cumbersome brooms like halberds under their arms. They turn the hydrant on at one corner of the street and send the filth swimming to the other corner. At night, a couple of cheap whores come roaming around from the place des Ternes, withdrawing into doorways at any sign of police. After midnight (like now: it must be close to one a.m.), the area is perilously quiet and empty except for occasional car tires whimpering around the dead square—spookily, as though ghosts were having a drag race.

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I’m well concealed here from my piglets and Nadine: isolated in the dense, close square of the walls of this room, deep in the narrow-chested, box-like structure of the shabby hotel, whose fire walls stick to the half-timber gables of the houses behind: former stables converted into petit bourgeois homes, presumably; their yards—with mangy geranium window boxes, atrophying jasmine bushes, and oleander saplings in weathered tubs—preserve the defoliating poetry of the horse-and-buggy world, the autumn efflorescence of mankind, already preparing for its journey of no return.

From the wallpaper’s sharp floral pattern (once a playground for bedbugs, repeated in the bedcover and the slipcover of the upholstered chair), a thousand round eyes peer at me—wondering whether I can muster the patience to remain by myself . . . they too steal away when I glance up to catch them unawares, and all I see are insignificant roses badly printed on bad paper and cheap cretonne in the tight-meshed tangle of their thorny twigs. (And no prince will break through them to stagger back in disappointment upon finding me here instead of Sleeping Beauty.)