And so, stripped of my work, I began to live a kind of floating life, setting out every day for long walks in my adopted city, the city I’d come to know and love more than the city of my birth, which I knew I would never see again. The war did not come straightaway, of course. By day, during those nine months, the gears of the great machine of Paris continued to grind as they always had. The signs of war were subtle: bread rations at bakeries and restaurants, blue shade-cloth covering the streetlights, dry fountains, sandbags piled around statues and buildings, posters on billboard hoardings with the latest ministerial diktats. Those who could returned to their villages or, in the affluent western neighborhoods, to their country estates. Those who stayed behind—those, that is, with nowhere else to go—seemed, after nightfall, infected by a fever of pleasure-seeking. The ten o’clock curfew was not enforced, and the indigo darkness served only to heighten the sense of the carnivalesque. Despite the dimness, rarely had the café terraces been so crowded, the brothel mattresses squeaked with such abandon, or the wooden floors of the bals-musettes trembled so lustfully with the thump of dancing heels.

I walked endlessly, in those nine months, all over the city, through neighborhoods new and old, opulent and threadbare, and even, occasionally, through the makeshift slums of the Zone, where the city walls had stood until only a generation ago, and out into the bedraggled suburbs. In the hush of early morning, the mist that laced the streets might have been mistaken for ghosts risen from the catacombs under my feet, piled floor to ceiling with the bones of millions of the city’s dearly departed.