It is ten minutes to two o’clock in the morning. I am lying in a bed in an upstairs room of Namur’s only inn, exhausted, barely able to hold my pen, surrounded by empty bottles of laudanum and sheets of paper upon which I have scrawled by candlelight the last of this, the finest and truest tale I have ever recounted. Édmonde is in the next room. We will meet with you tomorrow at the same splendid church where we met today. Édmonde reassures me that I am able to cross, that the power is in me even if I can’t remember. All I have to do, she says, is look into your eyes for a few minutes. Soon enough, a feeling of frothy joy will overtake us, she says, and the crossing will take place naturally, effortlessly. If, when we meet tomorrow, nothing of the sort happens, then I will simply have been deceived by a prankster or a lunatic. But if a crossing does take place, if events do transpire as Édmonde has foretold, then this story will stand as the testimony of it, so that if all you remember of your previous lives is in your dreams, then this story will serve you, dear girl, as both reminiscence and evidence of the man you once were.

Charles Baudelaire, Namur, Belgium,
Thursday, April 15, 1865

Go here.

City of Ghosts

The Cemetery

SHE STOOD IN front of the poet’s grave, smoking a cigarette, lost in her thoughts, in the Montparnasse cemetery. It was a brilliant May afternoon in Paris—not today’s Paris, vanquished and humiliated, but the city as it once was, only a short time ago but already far distant and forever lost. She wore a black silk dress printed with blooms of red hibiscus. The skin of her bare arms was golden, her raven-black hair curled into a chignon. It was nearly closing time, I remember. I was walking past her along the cemetery alley, headed for my apartment. I glanced at her without slowing—although perhaps, if it is at all possible, there was a flicker of hesitation, a hint of desire, a fleeting urge to stop, to approach her, to ask why she was standing there in front of this particular grave, a grave I myself had stood before many times, on this sunny and too-warm weekday afternoon in May. The sky was a dazzling and pure azure. My tie was loosened and my jacket slung over my shoulder. The grave she was standing before was that of Charles Baudelaire, the poet to whom I had, in a way, devoted the best years of my life.