“Only that your soul needs saving,” she replied. “Which is not untrue.” We entered the coffee house. Édmonde looked about a moment and, still gripping my forearm, started off in the direction of a young man sitting alone at a wooden table. The youth was so gaunt and angular in appearance he reminded me less of a man and more of a praying mantis, with a wispy beard and longish hair carefully arranged to fall over one eye. On account of his unusual height, he had adopted a permanent stooped posture and seemed to be folded into his chair rather than seated upon it. “Bonjour, Monsieur Roux. Allow me to introduce you to my friend, Monsieur Baudelaire.”

Roux stood and suddenly towered above me. My eyes reached only his shoulders. We bowed our heads and shook hands. His was clammy and insipid. There was a heavy pause for a moment as I found my kerchief and wiped the hand the seminarian had just held. “Madame Édmonde tells me you are in need of spiritual counsel,” the young man finally said, in a high, nasally voice that, I suspected, was intended to sound urbane.

“Quite,” I replied, and we fell back into an involuntary silence. I looked helplessly across to my co-conspirator but, as her face was veiled, found no clue of how to proceed. “And you are pursuing religious studies?”

“Why, certainly, I am resolved to serve God’s mission in the tropics—life among the savages of the Congo, saving the souls of the cannibals, bringing them into the light of Christ and so forth.” He began to describe to me, in a pinched, precious tone, the righteous future that lay before him. The impression his discourse made was not so much of vocation but of vanity, and yet he was completely unaware of his effect. As I listened to him, I began to consider the possibility of inhabiting that elongated body, of speaking in that whine, of using those spindly, spidery fingers for every task, of stooping my head every time I had to pass through a door. The thought of it was not a pleasant one. Would I, in the new body, comb my hair the same way? Would I speak with the same insufferable tone? If I retained no memory of my previous existences, and I entered such a body, what kind of fate was it that I was condemning myself to? He, in turn, was completely unaware of the fate that would befall him, were we to execute our designs. He would cross into my body, which teetered on the edge of permanent decrepitude. Such a fate was hardly better than mine. The thought of crossing with the seminarian seemed suddenly obscene.

“Charles?” I heard Édmonde’s voice. The youth had stopped talking and must have asked me a question, which, lost as I was in my meditations, I had not heard. I affected a toothache and begged my leave.