He studied me with narrowed eyes for a moment before resuming his feast. “Well, dear boy, it sounds like you would make a wonderful alienist yourself. But I can assure you I have no such doubts.”

“Is that so? You believe you have a soul that will go to heaven, or hell, depending on your actions in this lifetime?”

“I didn’t say I believe in an afterlife. I believe in the existence of the soul, which is quite a different matter.”

“What makes you so certain that there is such a thing, if there is no afterlife?”

Once again, Artopoulos scrutinized me. He seemed to come to a decision. “Dear boy, I think we are going to be the best of friends.” He gestured to a waiter to fill our glasses. When they were full, he took another sip, sloshing the wine in his mouth. Once he’d swallowed he resumed his speech—for even when one was alone with Artopoulos, he spoke mostly in speeches, each one delivered as if to a vast assembly. “There is no more exciting field in all the sciences than that of alienism. The alienists proclaim that society stands finally on the threshold of unravelling man’s deepest mysteries. In the future, they say, there will be no suffering. There will be remedies for our moral torments as efficacious as those for our physical afflictions.” He shoveled another forkful into his cavernous mouth, chewed, rabbit-like, several times, swallowed, and took up the thread once more. “I, for one, am not so convinced. If we have no soul, we are little better than animals. I am no different from this lobster here, for example,” he said, pointing toward the crustacean’s mutilated carcass. “But which of us is devouring the other?” He half smiled. “The simple fact that I am eating this lobster, in this restaurant, in this city, is proof enough for me that there is no moral equivalence between us. I have a soul, and as long as I am alive it is eternal. You really do drink far too slowly. We shall have to remedy that.”

Before I could stop him he’d taken my glass and filled it. On that afternoon, as forever after, Artopoulos was one of the most entertaining men I’d ever known, and not without a certain guile. He asked me about my family, provenance, education, station, and knowledge of poetry. The picture I painted for him in reply was that of a young man of inherited means, a gentleman at large, newly arrived in Paris, with exotic origins and a taste for dilettantism.

As we ate and drank, Artopoulos elaborated his plans for the Society. He seemed to covet an elevated social station and believed the Society was his means of achieving it. But first, he said, the Society must be restored: as it was, its library was in disarray, its finances a mess, its popularity so diminished that the members could now be counted on a single finger—“Unless, old chap,” he added, slowly lifting another finger, “I haven’t altogether discouraged you, and you still wish to join?”