“Quite good,” she said, getting in the car. “Me, in Combray. Do you mind driving? I’d like to see the city from the terraces of the Capitoline Hill.”

We got there in five minutes and went and leaned on the parapet just above the Forum. Beneath us, the squares were deserted, and the basilicas, frozen in marble, were dreaming of the day they would thaw.

“It’s stupid,” she said softly.

“What is?”

“Feeling nostalgic for something we never had.” She turned to look at a few tramps sleeping on the benches. It wasn’t too hard to find a young one with a beard for her game. “Basically, I envy them,” she said. “They’re so naturally part of things. What about you, what do you do for a living?” That wasn’t an easy question to answer, so I told her I did nothing. “What do you mean, nothing?” she said. “Everyone does something. Even me, though it may not look like it. I’m studying architecture, I just haven’t taken my exams yet. How do you spend your days?”

“Reading.”

“And what do you read?”

“Everything.”

“What do you mean, everything? Even streetcar tickets, labels on mineral water bottles, orders from the mayor for clearing snow?” She laughed.

“Yes, but I have a predilection for love stories,” I said. She took me seriously and said she found them frustrating because for her to like them they had to end badly, and if they ended badly, she didn’t like them. Had I read À la recherche? “I don’t have enough breath in me,” I said, maintaining that Proust was one of those writers who ought to be read aloud. The idea amused her, and she wanted to know which others that applied to. I mentioned the first books that came into my head: the Bible, Moby-Dick, the Arabian Nights. It struck me as a sufficiently engagé choice.

“You must have some favorites, though.”

“Yes,” I said. “Henry James Joyce, Bob Dylan Thomas, Scotch Fitzgerald, secondhand books in general.”

“Why secondhand?” she said, not picking up on my erudite wordplay.

“Because they cost less and because you can tell in advance, with a fair amount of certainty, if they’re worth reading.”

“How so?” she said, sitting on the parapet.

So I told her I looked for bread crumbs or pieces of crust between the pages, because a book you read while nibbling your food was sure to be good, or else I looked for grease stains, fingerprints, and not too many pages with folded-down corners. “Where you should look for folding is at the spine. If you fold a book back at the spine when you’re reading it, that means it’s good. If it’s a hardback, I look for stains, grazes, scratches—they’re all reliable signs.”

“What about if the person who read it before you was an idiot?”