All this time, I have tried to keep a watchful eye on the happenings at the Baudelaire Society. I have spent my days doing the rounds of booksellers and bouquinistes, keeping up with book gossip, which is always rife with scandal and conspiracy, or when the weather was inclement holing up in a library to browse the newspapers and magazines, study auction catalogues, and dissect the annual Gazette de la Société Baudelaire. This is how I learned, several years after the war, about the death of a bookseller who was said to be selling an unpublished short story manuscript by Baudelaire called “The Education of a Monster.” When I read that his eyes had been removed by the murderer, there was no mistaking the culprit. Artopoulos was baiting me, hoping to flush me out of hiding. Whether he had committed the act himself or through some third party mattered little. It was a coded message intended only for me: Here I am, the monster I had created seemed to say. Come and get me if you dare. The longer you wait the more harm I will do. Only you will be to blame.

It was also in the newspapers, the following year, 1923, that I learned of the death of that same monster. He too was buried in the Baudelaire Society crypt, although this time there was no question of my attending the burial. I knew he would not have died without crossing, so when, soon after, I learned that Gabrielle Chanel was the new president of the Society, I naturally assumed he’d crossed with her. Still I had to wait a decade for definitive confirmation. It came when the body of a Belgian industrialist was found, eyeless, in the Bois de Vincennes. A book collector, he’d come to Paris to buy the same previously unknown manuscript by Baudelaire. The soul of Joubert lived in that woman, I knew, and was mocking me still.

Nowadays, locked in my stalemate, I lead a quiet life. I prefer the dark to the light, night to day, underground to above ground. I shun society and have only one friend, the singer you met at the Shéhérazade. I work as a waitress there. Never in my previous lives have I been as alone as I am now. Sometimes I watch people passing by, yearning to live as they do, in the certainty of their mortality.