The American delegation at the Splendide granted me an American visa, but my efforts to procure an exit visa met with disappointment at every turn. I needed a certain stamp, and I didn’t have the certificate required to obtain it. I went through the motions all the same, hoping to be the beneficiary of an error, an oversight, an act of mercy. I joined the throngs waiting from morning to night at the Bureau des Étrangers. When, after a month, I received the final, definitive refusal, I staggered from the préfecture and wandered aimlessly until I reached the waterfront of the Old Port, entering a bistro simply to escape the blinding sun. I ordered oysters out of grief. They were one of the few things that were not rationed.

Even at night, the city glowed with a desert heat. Sundays, when the cafés and bars would close and the streets fell into somnolence, were the hardest to endure. The only relief from the heat was to swim in the clear, cold water off the rocks at the little port of Malmousque, one of us looking out for thieves at all times.

In desperation, Arthur and I tried disguising ourselves as sailors and boarding a ship. But our pasty skin betrayed us as the landlubbers we were and, when challenged for our merchant sailors’ tickets, the ruse was unmasked. We were lucky not to be reported to the police. Soon after, Arthur managed to get all his papers together; he left on a Thursday morning on a boat bound for Lisbon. Fritz and I went to see him off at the pier. “If anything happens to you, have you got something?” I asked. He shook his head. I gave him half of my morphine tablets. He skipped up the gangplank and, minutes later, the ship drifted away from its berth with a blast of its foghorn, in a cloud of fumes.

Madeleine was never far from my thoughts. Sometimes I would lie in bed at night, unable to sleep, thinking of her in her many guises, mulling over the riddles she’d posed. Remembering her last words, in my idle hours I would sit at a table in a café or at the rickety desk in my hotel room and I would write. The writing held me together. Over several weeks, I wrote out in full the stories she’d told me, trying to recreate the magic of that precious handful of days and nights we’d spent together. It was my way of being close to her. When I was done, I decided to keep writing. This time, I wrote my story, this story, which is after all only a humble story of a brief affair, one of countless such stories, of no consequence to anyone, perhaps, other than me.