To be unable to trust one’s own mind is a rare and unenviable terror. And this was now the condition that took hold of me. All these corroborations of Madeleine’s stories were eroding the pillars upon which had rested, for four and a half decades, my sense of what was real and what was not. Trying to pull myself together, I continued my tour of the room. Hanging between two windows was a framed, tea-colored chart of the world, not as it is but as it had been known a century or more ago. Someone had drawn a line that curved from one side of the map to the other, tracing a circumnavigation of the globe that had started and ended in Marseille and included a stop in the Pacific, on an island too small for the cartographer to record, but which the holder of the pencil had marked and named as Oaeetee. Below the map, on a stand, stood a scale-model replica of a three-masted sailing ship called the Solide, sailing under a French tricolor flag—not the blue, white, and red flag that was approved in 1794 but the red, white, and blue flag introduced in 1790, shortly after the Revolution. The model’s craftsmanship was first-rate. The maker had reproduced everything, every sail and rope, down to the officers and crew. Some were climbing the rigging, others keeping lookout, and one was manning the wheel. A circle of men was gathered on the main deck, where a sailor was tied to the bulwark and—I leaned forward to better study the scene depicted—being flogged. His back was expertly striated with waxy scarlet streaks, while another crewman was standing near him with a whip in his hand. Again, everything was exactly as Madeleine had described. Between the books, the map and the model ship, not to mention the events that had led me here, this was the moment of my complete persuasion, my conversion, my Damascus moment. If I could have slipped out of the building then and there, without even speaking to Chanel, I would have gladly done so, even at the cost of finding the manuscript, for I now had the answer to my most pressing question: Madeleine’s story was verified. There was no longer any need to meet Chanel. But it was at that very instant that I heard the clipped steps of a woman in high heels approaching from the corridor outside. The door opened and Chanel entered the room in a puff of rhythm, perfume and light, approaching me with a smile that vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Her hand was glacial to the touch.