“I don’t know how or why, but I must have passed out. When I came to, I was surrounded by a circle of onlookers. One man was leaning over me, holding my hand, talking to me, although I could barely make out what he was saying. My head was heavy and foggy, as if it had just been struck or woken from a long, narcotic sleep. The book peddler was opposite me, slumped back in her chair, her eyes wide open in terror, her mouth opening and closing, like a fish just hooked from the sea. The waiter appeared, asking what had happened. Two of the onlookers began talking at once, describing what they’d just witnessed—that we’d been looking at each other in silence when we both began convulsing for a short time, and then fainted. The waiter leaned over the woman and began shaking her by the shoulders. She was awake but barely aware of her surroundings. ‘You’d better get out of here before the police arrive,’ he told her. ‘I’ve a good mind to have you arrested.’ He turned to me and began apologizing profusely.”

I paused, searching for words to describe the strangeness of the memory, until now so long obscured. Madeleine’s gaze was fixed on me unwaveringly. “And then?” she whispered, almost reverentially.

“I was, for some moments, completely mystified about everything—who I was, where I was, how I had come to be there. My surroundings had not changed. Rather, it was inside me that everything had changed. What is my name? I wondered, and my name suddenly appeared to me. Where am I? I wondered, and the word Paris rose to the surface of my mind. Where am I from? Suddenly Berlin appeared. Who was this woman splayed on a chair before me? A book peddler who’d offered to read my fortune. And so on, a gush of memories surfacing one after the other, all in the space of a moment.