These are attempts at needling me—but they are too circuitous to penetrate my skin. I feel much more lucid now: the Pervitin is taking effect. But I can’t stand it here anymore. I suggest a walk. The place de Furstenberg is a few yards away. (“Almost quite genuinely Parisian, especially if you bear in mind that a church tower designed by Buffet casts its shadow upon it . . .” He’s bending over backward now and frazzling my nerves.)

I have to get some fresh air. I want to gaze along the Seine. We wander over to the Pont Neuf. The day is delicious; foggy this morning, it has brightened radiantly. But I’m sweating hard in my heavy clothes. I have to take off my jacket, but I’m so badly soaked that I’m immediately shivering. I get in a desperate rage about my body. I tell him more about my ailments and Hertzog’s therapeutic method than I care to have revealed. I instantly regret it and ask him, more aggressively than I intended, why he’s smiling. He asks me quite cheerfully to please excuse him. He says that our being on the Pont Neuf reminds him of a passage in Proust: Swann, deathly ill, goes out into society once more, knowing it’s the last time. He runs into Guermantes and wistfully tells him that they probably won’t see each other again. Guermantes, about to move on to another reception and only half listening, booms cheerily, “Vous! Vous nous survivrez tous! Vous êtes fort comme le Pont Neuf!”

I don’t quite know how I’m supposed to take this anecdote, as pointed malice or as sovereign tactlessness. While I think about it, he himself realizes the ambivalence and turns it to his own advantage: he smiles shamelessly, as if he had deliberately led me up the garden path.

I sense that none of this is quite right, but I feel like an oaf. His unimpeachability humiliates me. He is healthy, alert, elegant. He speaks about Guermantes and Swann as if they were part of his daily circle of friends here. He reads his Proust in French. I snort in my bearskins and remember that only two hours ago at the airport, I was humiliated to learn how poor my French is.

My eyes swim as I gaze up the Seine. (I still have my reading glasses on, I couldn’t find the other pair in my pockets, it’s probably flown to Tangier with the suitcase.) His eyes are imperturbable. For him it’s an everyday scene. But, as if to show me that he feels what it means for me to be here, he makes an ironically melancholy remark and then launches into his love story—with an aloofness that is sheer stratagem: he underplays it, reduces his chaotic existence to a microscope slide. It sounds written. The effects are precisely worked out. And with that he arouses my curiosity. I want to find out what the truth is. I offer to go with him to the hotel where he speculates the girl is hiding.