I had to hurry to keep up with her. I kept my head down, catching another red and black flash of her from afar. She darted to the next crypt and looked about her as if checking to see if she’d been followed. Pursuing women in this manner was not something I had ever done before. Why now? Curiosity, of course. Perhaps also out of the anxious boredom of those days. But I remember realizing I was enjoying myself. She scurried across the circular clearing at the center of the cemetery, where an angel stands disconsolate on a plinth inscribed with the word Memory, and disappeared behind a thicket of headstones. I stopped and surveyed the scene. No sign of her. I approached the place I’d last seen her, where the Avenue de l’Est meets the Avenue Transversale. Still no sign of her. She’d disappeared. I scanned all around, my heart thudding in my chest, my eyes squinting in the sun’s glare. I hadn’t been to this part of the cemetery before. On my left stood a marker of mottled gray and pink marble. Engraved in gold leaf on the plinth were the words La Société Baudelaire, below which were the following names:

Édmonde Duchesne de Bressy, 1845–1900, founder and president

Lucien Roeg, 1866–1900, secretary

Hippolyte Balthazar, 1876–1917, secretary

Aristide Artopoulos, 1872–1923, president

I felt a presence behind me and heard the click of the catch of a gun being released. I turned and there she was, the woman I’d been following, pointing a small gun at my chest.

“Who are you?” we both asked in unison, then stood glowering at each other in silence. The hand that held the gun trembled slightly. The features of her face, the face of an elegant Asiatic woman in her forties, were unadorned and severe.

“Why are you following me?” she asked. “What do you want from me?” She, too, spoke with an accent. The music of her speech, the rhythms of it, were organized differently, but I could not say precisely how. Being a foreigner means not just speaking with a foreigner’s accent, but being unable to recognize the accents of others.