As we walked, we heard a rumble disrupt the morning stillness from further upriver. As we neared the Place Saint-Michel, we saw the Pont Saint-Michel was clogged with cars, lorries, tractors, horses, and oxen, each piled high with furniture and mattresses. Evacuees, haggard and exhausted, escaping the German advance for southern safety. Some were on bicycles, others pushed carts, wheelbarrows, and prams. Their vehicles had northern and Belgian license-plate numbers. The mattresses that crowned their vehicles were intended to protect them in case of strafing by Stukas. Street urchins nipped at their heels, selling newspapers, water, choucroûte, and hot chicory. Along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the crowds in the cafés and restaurants spilled over into the streets. These signs of imminent invasion did nothing to dull the glow of intense happiness I felt walking arm in arm with Madeleine. They had the opposite effect: they burnished it. They gave it a counterpoint and a purpose.

I felt Madeleine squeeze my arm. “We must go back to the cemetery.”

“Why?”

“My gun.”

At the Pont Neuf we turned right into the Rue Dauphine, where calm was restored. Away from the tumult of the southbound boulevards, the streets were empty. We turned into the Boulevard Mazarine, crossed the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and continued onto the Rue de l’Odéon. The echo of our footfalls bounced off the surrounding walls, plastered here and there with posters demanding Silence! The enemy is listening. We stopped to look in the window at Shakespeare and Co. The shop was closed, but a cat was reclining on a shelf, blinking contentedly among the books on display, its ginger tail twitching. Adrienne and Sylvia were stirring upstairs, I imagined, among those who refused to leave Paris. In a couple of hours they would open the store as usual. The store of the antiquarian bookseller Jacquenet was a little further up the street. We stopped to look there too. My attention was taken by an advertisement pasted on the window. It was a notice of an auction that was to take place the following week at the Hôtel Drouot.

“What is it?” asked Madeleine. She craned her neck forward and mouthed the words as she read them, before stopping and looking at me with eyes wide.

“It can’t be,” she said, leaning against the glass, her hands shielding the sides of her face as she scanned the interior of the store. “And yet…” She gasped, drawing back and putting her hands to her mouth. “There,” she said, pointing to a table on the other side of the window, upon which were a number of volumes on display stands. “There on the right, the small volume. Do you see it?”

“Yes.” It looked innocuous enough—a slim volume bound in dark red leather. I studied it at length. The title and author’s name were embossed on the cover for all to see: The Education of a Monster, Ch. Baudelaire.