I waited, over the following weeks, for instructions from the estate—whether to go ahead with the commission or to return it to its new owner, whoever that might be. But I never heard from anyone. If I didn’t volunteer the information that it was in my safekeeping, it was not entirely out of self-interest, but also from dread. Obviously, I didn’t wish to visit upon my own family the fate that had befallen the Baroness. There was only one person in the world, other than my wife, who might know where it was: the man who’d delivered it—and I hadn’t so much as seen his face. I wasn’t even sure it had been a man. Given the value of the package, I was confident the estate would eventually contact me, and so I left the manuscript unbound.

Several months passed before I finally accepted the possibility that no one would be coming in search of it. It had, by accident, fallen into my lap. I decided the Baroness’s request no longer applied. Now that it belonged to me, even if provisionally, I was free to read it. In one fevered sitting, on a winter’s night so cold ice was forming on the Seine, I read all three of the manuscript’s stories in the order in which I’d found them. The first of them, “The Education of a Monster,” appears to be a short story written by Charles Baudelaire, although no other record of such a story exists anywhere other than a brief note in the poet’s journal. The handwriting, however, seems authentic, even if the story itself does not, for reasons that will become clear to the reader. The second story, “City of Ghosts,” is a kind of noir thriller set in Paris in 1940, seemingly narrated by Walter Benjamin, in which “The Education of a Monster” plays a pivotal role. The third story, “Tales of the Albatross,” is the strangest of the three: it seems to be the autobiography of a kind of deathless enchantress.

And so, having read the story, working alone in a soft dawn light, I set about binding it. In the end, I chose a conventional, nondescript binding, using a horse leather the French call “skin of sorrow,” in cardinal red. I had no doubt in my mind that it was valuable, perhaps even priceless, as the Baroness had contended. But the circumstances in which it had come to me suggested the manuscript should not draw undue attention to itself.