My storytelling was a nocturnal activity intended to comfort and console as well as to educate. When he woke screaming and wet with sweat, I would ask Charles what he’d dreamed and I played the part of the interpreter. In this way over the years I was able to tell him about Koahu and Roblet, and Alula and Joubert. For a long time, I avoided mentioning that I was Alula and Joubert, and he Koahu and Roblet. I wanted the idea to be born in him. He listened gratefully to my stories—they were a kind of balm for him, soothing his frayed nerves. But he never took them seriously. He considered them brilliant improvisations, exotic fancies, and nothing more. As for his own story about Roblet, he stopped telling it. Rather, inspired by me, he began improvising stories of his own. In these fabricated tales, he had not returned to France from Mauritius at the earliest opportunity, but had continued to roam the Orient. He invented stories about life at sea, the tropics, travel, exile, and adventure, tales designed to impress the impressionable salons of Paris, many of whose guests had never strayed far from the capital. He lied with relish about his fictional journeys in India, in Ceylon and Sumatra and China, Tahiti and the Sandwich Islands, claiming to have traveled for years and suffered all manner of adventures and deprivations. There was always an enthusiastic gallery for his improvisations, and his audiences hungrily swallowed every preposterous word. Traces of my stories seeped their way into his poems too—an albatross, a tamarind tree, a storm-tossed sea—but how could I hold any of this against him? I saw him as a tragic figure: a man who had forgotten his past and, in forgetting it, had become lost in it. This helped me forgive him his flaws: his lies, his vanities, his inconstancies, his cunning, his rages, and his self-absorption.