The book-collecting fraternity is a small circle, and news travels fast. Two days later, as I was walking by the river along the Quai de la Tournelle, I ran into Morgane Rambouillet, a riverside bouquiniste who specializes in nineteenth-century romances and who I knew had counted the Baroness among her regulars. She was beside herself with excitement. According to Rambouillet, the Baroness had not died in her sleep at all. She had been murdered, and moreover her body had been found with its eyeballs missing. I shuddered when I heard this, remembering the illustrated ivory miniature that had arrived with the manuscript a week and a half earlier. I hurried home to investigate the matter online. The obituary in Le Monde repeated the version of events I’d been given over the telephone—a peaceful, somnolent death—while Le Figaro’s obituary glossed over the circumstances of death altogether. The only mention of the Baroness’s grisly demise was in a short report in the Belgian newspaper L’Echo, published the day after the incident. To an untrained eye, it seemed as if the details surrounding the Baroness’s death had been hushed up.

For days afterward, my wife and I discussed the matter. What haunted me, no less than the murder of one of the last grandes dames of Paris, was the fate of those two gray agate wonders, remarked upon by all those who’d known her—her eyes. My father had told me that, in her youth, though not especially pretty, Beattie Ellingham had passed as a great beauty thanks to those eyes. They were the wellspring of her charm, perhaps even the key to her destiny. Her marriage to the Baron de Croÿ had turned out unhappily, but her eyes never lost their sparkling, feline quality.

My wife, always more practical than I, considered it perfectly understandable that I’d been lied to on the telephone. “They have to think of the family’s reputation,” she said. “They’re not going to tell every random stranger who happens to call that she was mutilated and murdered.” We concluded that the Baroness must have been mixed up in some shady book business. Rare books can bring out the worst in people. Naturally, this led us to the same thought, one almost too awful to contemplate: could the murder of the Baroness be connected somehow with the manuscript now lying in my safety deposit box?