Half an hour later, at the agreed time, with my right hand wrapped around the derringer in my pocket, I rang the bell at the Society’s entrance. It was opened by the same besuited thug I’d seen before who, if he was at all surprised to see me, didn’t betray it. Ushered into the entrance hall, I felt like I’d stepped into a recurring dream. The marbled staircase with curved cast-iron palings, the damask drapes, the frayed oriental rugs strewn over the mosaic floor tiles, the chandeliers, the mahogany furniture—it was a kind of museum dedicated to the moth-eaten pomp of the Second Empire. I was led down a corridor to an anteroom where I was instructed to await Madame Chanel’s arrival. The sense of déjà vu continued: every object—the velvet confidante on which I sat, the brocaded floor lamp beside me, the rug on which my feet rested, the Delacroix lithographs in gilded frames hanging on the walls—prompted chimes of recognition and dread.

The valet reappeared and announced that Madame Chanel would receive me. I followed him into the library, where two leather armchairs faced each other across a wide mahogany writing desk. Three of the four walls were entirely covered with books. I cast an eye over them. One wall was given over to every edition ever published of Baudelaire’s work, including in foreign languages. The other shelves were devoted to the secondary literature—books about Baudelaire: biographies, memoirs, criticism. All the volumes were uniformly bound in the same red peau de chagrin, with gold-leaf embossing, that had covered the Baudelaire manuscript at the auction. So about this, too, Madeleine had been right: “The Education of a Monster” had been in the Society library all along. Why was the Society going to such lengths to retrieve a book it had just sold at auction? The only possible explanation was Madeleine’s.