Another night in the hotel. I spent it in a fitful sleep, eyes closed but mind spinning like a motor. I woke famished—I hadn’t eaten since the previous morning. I headed out with my suitcase to find some food, into another morning of golden fog laced with the sting of petroleum. The rumble of distant artillery was louder than the previous evening’s. Outside the locked gate of the Gare de l’Est, an old toothless woman sold me a boiled potato, ungarnished. A vendor standing nearby was selling a newspaper I’d never seen before, L’Édition parisienne de guerre. I bought a copy. Retreat, panic—finally the headlines were coinciding with reality. It was almost eight o’clock—two hours until my appointment.

I walked down a hushed Boulevard de Strasbourg, rendered sepia by the smoke; it was as if I’d stepped into a Marville daguerreotype. Remembering the singer’s words of the previous night, I looked around to see if I was being followed. A figure in a black hat and cape, possibly a priest, was half a block behind me. I turned left into the Passage du Désir as far as the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. Every shop was locked and shuttered. I turned south again as far as the Passage Brady. The man in the black cape was nowhere to be seen. It occurred to me that I might thread together all the arcades on the way to Saint-Eustache—a good way to kill time and shake a tail.

I crossed the street diagonally into the Passage de l’Industrie and looked over my shoulder; my heart skipped a beat. There, stepping into the Passage Brady, was the figure in black. Was it just coincidence? I waited to see if he would reappear, but there was no further sign of him. I hurried on, left into the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, left again into the Passage du Prado, following its rightward turn until I emerged next to the Porte Saint-Denis, where the walls of the old city had stood in the time of Louis XIV. I pressed onward, sweating now in the morning heat, shoulders aching from carrying my suitcase, threading together the Passages Lemoine and Ponceau, dedicated almost entirely to Jewish textile merchants; next was Passage du Caire, the longest of them all; I turned back at Réaumur to Passage Basfour and Passage de la Trinité, hardly arcades so much as back alleys with their usual ammoniac stench; down to the neighborly Passage de l’Ancre; and finally through the stately Passages du Bourg l’Abbé and du Grand-Cerf, two of the finest arcades in the city, more luminous than ever in the golden light streaming through their glass roofs. The few passersby I came across seemed dumbstruck, walking as if underwater.