“Every time I see her,” Renand said, “she asks if Madame Édmonde has returned.”

“She asks me the same thing,” added Carlotta.

My heart skipped a beat. “And what do you say?”

“I tell her Madame Édmonde is dead,” said Renand, “but she never remembers. She’s lost her wits.”

I felt a charge like being plunged under cold water.

“I asked her once why she wanted to know,” said Carlotta. “Hard to imagine it, but it seems she and Madame Édmonde were both Communards.”

Excusing myself as politely as I could without drawing attention to myself, I dashed out of the building, grabbing my jacket and hat on the fly. I looked up and down the street. The woman was nowhere to be seen. I turned left and ran around the corner, to the end of the island, where the cathedral and the Île de la Cité come into view. I saw her from a distance: she had just stepped onto the Pont Saint-Louis, headed toward the cathedral. I ran after her.

“Madame!” I shouted as I neared her. The hunchbacked figure stopped and turned. It was some four decades since I’d last seen her. She had aged terribly, but she was still recognizably Mathilde. “Madame, I’m told you’re looking for Édmonde de Bressy.”

“Yes.”

“Unfortunately, Édmonde passed away several years ago.”

“I see. You’re quite sure?”

“Quite sure, madame. You can stop looking for her.”

“Thank you for letting me know.” I could hear her familiar, sing-song accent.

“You’re welcome,” I said. Mathilde turned to continue her way along the bridge. “She did manage, however, to make a crossing before she died.”

Mathilde froze for a moment and then straightened her back. She turned to face me. “What is your name, monsieur?”

“My name is Hippolyte Balthazar.”

“And what is mine?”

“Your name is Mathilde Roeg.”

“I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”

We must have made a curious sight, she and I, beggarwoman and dandy, embracing on that bridge for so long.

I could not lodge Mathilde in my apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, as it was too close to that of Artopoulos. I feared what he would do if he discovered I was harboring her. Instead, I found her a comfortable room in an out-of-the-way hotel where we might converse to our hearts’ content. There we talked for the rest of the day. For eleven years, Mathilde told me, she had been in hiding, moving from boarding house to boarding house, making a living of sorts peddling books. She had never received the telegram I’d sent her from Kansas, or if she had, she’d never read it. Although a bookseller, she was still illiterate. Stubborn as she was, she had never even attempted to learn. When Lucien traveled, she told me, she would put all her correspondence in a pile on her desk at the Baudelaire Society, awaiting his return. When I heard this, I could not suppress a shiver of horror. Artopoulos must have read the telegram. It was the first definitive sign that he was who I’d suspected him to be, and that he had known who I was from the very beginning. He must have been expecting me, when I first appeared at the Baudelaire Society. And ever since, he had been toying with me, never once saying or doing anything that gave himself away, even though he must have known that I suspected him in return.