The key to staying out of reach of the secret police was to go out walking at dawn. For some reason, the Sûreté Nationale conducted its round-ups before breakfast. I also resolved to avoid speaking to strangers for fear that my accent would betray me, thus depriving myself of one of life’s great pleasures. There is no hiding an accent. No amount of effort or care or practice can ever rid one of it. Outside my circle of friends, every sound that came from my mouth was a possible self-betrayal as a boche, a chleuh, a fridolin. Two friends lived in my building on Rue Dombasle: Arthur, a Hungarian journalist, and Fritz, a surgeon I knew from Berlin who now earned his living performing illegal abortions. For a price, the landlady was prepared to overlook certain discrepancies in our paperwork. We played poker together on Saturday nights. Sometimes I would have coffee in one of the cafés where German émigrés gathered to swap fragments of information. It was tempting to believe that, with enough of these scraps, one might weave a kind of protective blanket around oneself, but the information was unreliable, and these dens swarmed with spies and informants.

Often, at the end of my long walks, I would return to my apartment through the Montparnasse cemetery. It was an island of tranquility in an ocean of chaos. Here, I was beyond danger’s reach, as if I’d stepped out, for a moment, of the city’s hall of mirrors. I was a giant in a miniature city. The graves, grand or simple, tended or abandoned, depending on the fortunes of those buried inside them, were miniature buildings that lined its miniature avenues. From the main entrance on Boulevard Quinet, I’d turn right into the Avenue du Boulevard, past the old Israelite section (the cemetery’s ghetto), and turn left into the Avenue de l’Ouest, where, buried in the family crypt a little way up the incline between the mother he loved too much and the stepfather he loathed, lay Charles Baudelaire. There were always flowers on the tombstone left by the poet’s admirers, as well as little notes: a few lines from one of his poems, or an original poem imitating his style, opening a trapdoor into a secret universe of longing. I’d continue walking uphill along the Avenue de l’Ouest to the rear cemetery wall, re-entering the tumult of the city through a narrow gate in the corner.