Until only two or three generations ago, there existed, in Paris as throughout the world, people who earned a living of sorts as storytellers. In taverns and coffee houses, around banquet tables and campfires, people gathered to listen to their tales, tales the storytellers recited with great skill, perfected and elaborated over years and decades. Sometimes their stories rhymed or were sung. Sometimes they lasted several days, weeks, or months. Each night, people would crowd around the storyteller, eagerly awaiting the next installment. Mechanical printing ended the era of the storyteller, just as radio or cinema or some other wonder yet to be invented may one day end the era of printing. But to hear Madeleine tell her story was to be magically transported back to that era. Everything about the way she told it was mesmerizing. Her diction was low and precise, obliging me to lean in to capture every word, but her voice dipped and soared according to its own music. She kept her facial expressions and physical gestures to a minimum at first, but as her story progressed so were its twists and turns enacted by her body. As for the story itself, it was breathtaking. The tale of the albatross was the myth of two young lovers, a young woman called Alula and a young man—a mere boy, really—called Koahu, who lived on a faraway island, and of their exile. I have since committed it to paper, writing everything of it I can remember—but mine is a pale imitation. There are a great many details I cannot recall, for one thing, and for another I cannot tell the story the way it was told to me. I can scarcely reconstruct the circumstances of its telling—the nocturnal silence of the city outside, the soft light of the bedside lamp, the curlicues of blue smoke rising from the glowing end of a cigarette, the scent of sandalwood.