Perhaps it was Madeleine’s story I fell in love with, more than Madeleine herself. Perhaps the spectrum of love is broader than we think, and it is possible to fall in love with a story, or a song, or a film or painting, the way one falls in love with another person, only one assumes it is the storyteller one is in love with, the singer, the actor or artist, because the thought hasn’t occurred to us that it is possible to fall in love with a thing. I knew her story was a fiction, but I believed it all the same. Our passions seem unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. But as much as I was enchanted by her story, I never considered it anything other than a story—a marvelous story, granted, perhaps one of the most marvelous stories I’d ever heard, but just a story. Madeleine, on the other hand, seemed wholly convinced that the story she was telling was not only true, but that it had happened to her, and by implication also to me. She believed these stories the way others believe in the signs of the zodiac. This was completely new to me. I had never before fallen in love with someone who held beliefs so different from my own. But there are a great many beliefs in common currency that are less credible than Madeleine’s were, and the mysteries of love do not require the complete alignment of convictions. I was drawn to her despite these differences, and I couldn’t understand why. That is a riddle I am still trying to solve.

When her story, or at least what would turn out to be its first installment, was done, I blinked as if waking from a dream. Through the cracks in the shutters, I could see the first blush of sunrise. Madeleine was already half asleep. “We have to go.”

We walked toward the river in silence. The streets were an especially delicate, limpid blue, and their stillness was enlivened only by the occasional errand boy or delivery man, here a staggering drunk, there a woman of the night returning home at the end of her work. The bakeries were open, as were the workers’ cafés, their windows crossed with brown adhesive tape in case of bombardment, but the rest of the shops were shuttered, some with the ever more common sign: Closed until further notice. Pedestrians walked about carrying their boxed gas masks. By the time we got to the river, the sun had just risen above the rooftops. We walked along Quai Voltaire. Diamonds of light sparkled on the water and through the leaves of the riverside trees. We passed the green bookstalls of the bouquinistes, their tin lids fastened overnight with great iron locks.