As we get up, an irritating mishap occurs. I want to say, jokingly, “Allons, enfants de la patrie!” (one of the few French phrases I recall from school), but I bellow out the words. I’m so startled that I almost knock the table over. The wine bottle tumbles from its basket, the remaining wine spills across the tablecloth. We walk to the hotel. He shows me the room where he lived and wrote while waiting for the girl (in a different room, one flight up) to ask for him: three o’clock at night or seven in the morning, depending on her whim or mood. If he went out, he gave the porter the most detailed information for her on where she could reach him, when he planned to return, and when he’d be at her disposal again. (With a smile, he says, “Discreetly at your service any hour of the day or night, the perfect nurse,” as if he wants to recommend himself to me.)

He offers to drive me back to the Left Bank. His car is parked in a garage a few steps away on the place des Ternes. I beg off. I’m at the end of my tether. I want to be alone. But I tell him, “If you’d like to come with me, I’m going back on foot.”

He cheerfully agrees. “I’d love to.” And gently takes my arm because I am about to run down a baby carriage. All along the avenue des Ternes, he chats away at me (with constant gentle grabs at my arm to steer me past hindrances). But eventually he lapses into silence. He only asks once (when I stumble), “Shouldn’t we really take a cab?” I retort that as a good German infantryman I marched from Ukraine to Mount Athos, but I get the words out only in fits and starts.

The redhead is still standing by the Madeleine. I shake him off. “Excuse me, but I think I’ll go off with this girl now.”

He says, “I’ll be waiting for you in the café over there.”

For a moment I feel like punching him in the nose. His eyes are as imperturbable as when he gazed along the Seine. But he gives the girl a small, encouraging smile. She makes a face at him: “Salaud!” Then she takes me by the arm.