“About why I looked for you?” He considered for a moment. “Because, when I first saw you, I said to myself: ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’ It was therefore necessary to find you.”

She stared at him in silence for a moment.

“You tie yourself to a railing and hang there offering to piss on people’s heads, and then you catch sight of a person you’ve never seen before in your life, and you decide to marry her?”

“That’s it, exactly.”

“You’re insane. I’m eating with a lunatic.” She shook her head. “No chance, monsieur.”

“You can’t refuse.”

“I certainly can.”

“Impossible. I haven’t asked you yet.”

“Ah. What an asshole.”

The next week, however, when she found him waiting for her one evening, she told him that, if he liked, they could meet on the following Sunday afternoon. “Meet me in front of the Trocadéro at two,” she said.

Sunday was a warm September day. She was wearing a pale striped dress and sash.

On the slope below the Trocadéro’s Moorish concert hall as it looked across the river to the site of Monsieur Eiffel’s tower, there were some pleasure gardens, which contained two big statues, one of an elephant, the other of a rhinoceros.

“I remember my father bringing me here to look at these,” Édith told him, “when I was a girl.” She smiled. “So I like to come and see them sometimes.” She shrugged. “It brings back good memories.”

“Is your father still around?”

She shook her head.

“There’s an aquarium,” she said, pointing to a long, low building. “Have you ever been in there?”

He hadn’t. They spent a pleasant half hour looking at all manner of exotic fish. There was a small deep-water black squid that fascinated him. And exotic jellyfish with poisonous stings. Even more exciting was an electric eel that could kill a man. The power of these sea monsters attracted Thomas, and he pointed them out eagerly to Édith. “They’re even more impressive than the sharks,” he said. She looked, but preferred the brightly colored tropical fish.

When they had finished, Édith led the way. He noticed that they were going toward the rue de la Pompe.

“When my mother was my age,” she remarked, “this wasn’t part of Paris at all. It was all the village of Passy.”

“Same with Montmartre.”

“Did you know,” she said proudly, “that Ben Franklin, the great American, used to live up the street from here?”

“Oh.” He’d heard of Ben Franklin, though he couldn’t remember much about him. “I didn’t know that.”

“On the west side of Passy, there was a small palace where Marie Antoinette used to stay.” She glanced at him. “You can tell I am very proud of Passy.”

“Yes.”

“So. I am going to show you something even more important.”