“Did you tell the other guy this?”

“He didn’t ask.”

“What did he ask?”

“He wanted to know where Vennet lives.”

“And where’s that?”

She looked at me without replying, puffing calmly on her pipe.

“Where does Vennet live, madame? His life may depend on the answer.”

“You’re German, aren’t you?” she eventually spat.

I took all the notes and coins I had in my pocket and gave them to her.

The address the old woman gave me was in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, one of the city’s most hard-pressed neighborhoods. For centuries it had reeked with the stench of the tanneries that lined both sides of the Bièvre, the little stream that had since been covered over but still flowed under the streets, past the Jardin des Plantes and into the Seine. The neighborhood had long been condemned as insalubrious, and what hadn’t already been demolished was slated for the wrecking ball. But all that was forgotten in the light of the noonday sun. It was lunchtime and the narrow streets teemed with children—at least, those too old to have been sent to the country—immersed in countless self-devised intrigues. They seemed unworried by the impending invasion. Their parents had no country homes to flee to, and they would simply have to make do as they had always done. As I wandered in search of Vennet’s apartment, the heat, the interplay of sun and shadow, the white waves of bleached linen suspended overhead, the smell of frying onions from open windows, all combined dizzyingly with less tangible things—my worries, my sorrows, my fears—so that, more than once, I had to stop and put my hand against a wall to regain my composure.

Having found Vennet’s building, I groped my way up four flights of stairs in near total darkness, lighting matches to view the names written beside the doors. When I found Vennet’s place I knocked without reply. I tried turning the handle and the door swung open. I stood at the threshold for a moment before stepping inside. All was stuffy, gloomy—the smell of cigarettes and a human body. It was a single room much like my own, with a kitchenette in one corner. The curtain of the only window was drawn. Against every wall, stacks of books were piled waist-high. The middle of the room was strewn with more books, as if piles of them had been ransacked or knocked over in a struggle. I felt like King Kong standing in the middle of a ruined metropolis of books. There was a bed by the window with a body lying on the thin mattress, turned away from the door. I called out Vennet’s name but there was no response. Crossing the room with careful steps, I reached the other side, threw back the curtain and opened the window, breathing in the fresh air with the relief of a drowning man.