In the spring of 1913, I was called one day to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital to attend to a woman who had suffered, that very morning at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, a fugue state. There was Mathilde, her eyes wide open, her lips whispering something indecipherably Germanic, her head shaking as though in disbelief—all symptoms of that bewilderment that haunts the ambushed soul after a crossing. I asked the policeman who’d brought her there what he knew of what had occurred. Witnesses had reported, he said, that at the time of the incident she’d been telling the fortune of a German tourist. Precisely what had happened was a mystery—the young man had left the scene. That was all the policeman knew.

My relief that she had managed a crossing was tempered by the sorrow that whoever she’d crossed with was now somewhere far away. How much of his previous existences did he remember? What were the chances of our ever crossing paths again? I placed the shell of Mathilde in a home for the elderly. She never recovered from her fugue, and some time later she died in her sleep, a year before Europe began to tear itself apart. She was buried in a grave in a suburban cemetery marked only by her initials. I’d managed to keep our reunion a secret from Artopoulos, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Like so many others, the outbreak of war brought out a bloodlust in Artopoulos hitherto disguised as a fondness for hunting and social advancement. He enlisted at the declaration of hostilities and urged me to do the same. Having gone through the horrors of the Commune, I was a little more circumspect, but I figured I might do some good in the Medical Corps. Artopoulos pulled some strings and received a captain’s commission in the cavalry. The war only widened the distance that had grown between us. As the conflict dragged on, its barbarity seemed to shatter the artifice of our already dubious friendship. I found my distance from him a relief. Our letters became less frequent and more guarded until eventually we stopped writing altogether.

The man who was wheeled into my office at two o’clock that afternoon was unrecognizable as the man I’d once counted as my closest friend. His body, face, and limbs were contorted, distended, and racked with convulsions—one of the worst presentations of shellshock I’d seen. The war had wrecked him.

“Bonjour, Artopoulos,” I said as the nurse handed me his case notes.

“B-b-b-b-bon-j-j-jour,” he labored as I skimmed the paperwork. The notes revealed his rank was second lieutenant. This surprised me. The death rate of commissioned officers in battle was such that promotion was almost guaranteed, and his battalion, stationed in Champagne, had seen some of the worst of the fighting. But Artopoulos had been demoted, twice. The notes explained several of his men had complained of unwanted, forceful advances.