She bit her lower lip and looked away, holding the cigarette with trembling hands and puffing nervously. She was, for a moment, entirely alone, withdrawn into herself as if unaware of my presence.

After a minute or two she stood and sauntered over to my bookshelf, crammed with books. “What do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

“I see you have a great many books about Baudelaire.” She picked up Les Fleurs du mal. She smiled, curling up one side of her mouth almost imperceptibly. “Which is your favorite poem of his?”

“That’s a hard question to answer. There are so many. Perhaps ‘To a Passerby.’”

With her forefinger running over the spines of the books, she recited, from memory, “Fugitive beauty, in whose gaze I was suddenly reborn…”

“Will I see you again only in eternity?”

She gave me a searching look from across the room, as if not knowing quite what to make of me. “Interesting choice.”

“And yours?” I asked.

“‘The Albatross.’”

“The Poet is the prince of clouds, the storm-clouds haunting and the archer mocking…”

“But exiled on earth amid the crowds, his great wings prevent him from walking.” She gave me that little smile again. “He stole that poem.”

“Stole it? From whom?”

“From me.” She turned back to the shelf and studied the books with her head tilted at an angle. “I gave him the idea. I told him the tale of the albatross, and he turned it into a poem.”

“You knew him?” The notion was absurd, of course, but it was a pleasure to indulge her fantasy.

“Yes. Not in this body, of course. In another.”

“Whose?”

“Jeanne’s.”

“I don’t quite follow,” I said, as it began to dawn on me that she was serious. “Do you mean Jeanne Duval? His mistress?”

Madeleine sauntered to the bed and lay back on the mattress. “I was his mistress,” she sighed. “His mistress, his slave, his torment—and, for a while at least, I was also his muse.” She snorted. “Muse—how I detest that word. Charles was a thief. He stole from everyone—money, poems, books, love, you name it. Of course, he had talent. But his greatest talent was for theft.”

Perhaps, at any other time, I would have reacted to these signs of delusion differently. I might have been more guarded. I might have gently shepherded Madeleine through the night and then out of my life. But, at that moment, her fancies seemed harmless compared to the great tide of madness consuming the outside world. “How is that possible?” I asked.

She shot me a piercing glance. “It is possible, that’s all that matters.” She sat up on one elbow and looked at me. Despite what she was saying, I found myself enjoying the sensation of her gaze. “When did they begin, these nightmares of yours?” she asked.

“When I was a young man, just before the last war. When I was maybe nineteen or twenty.”