The reason that I write, however, is that after my foul mood at the musée, yesterday I caught a cab back to the institute with the sole purpose of seeing the journals again. As I opened the vault, I found my hands shaking so hard that it took me two attempts before I could enter the correct code. It had been months since I’d seen them, so I went into the vault and pulled the box where they were stored. I’d longed to hold the composition books in my hands. The real story had been contained here—it had completed the works for me—made the paintings come alive!

Once in the vault, I flipped open the lid and breathed easy. The three composition books were still there, sitting in their plastic. It is here that I don’t know how to begin. I picked them up, so desperate to touch them that I didn’t use gloves. I held the first one in my hands, the cover so old it was like thin fabric. I flipped open the first page and it took me a moment to realize what I was seeing—or not seeing. I was turning page after page of dull, faded, blank paper.

Cecile’s words are gone. The loss of them has made me wonder if they were ever there at all. I doubt myself so much now. The pages are blank and my heart is broken.

In all this time, I’ve begun to reflect. Much of the real story of the loss and the love between Émile and Cecile was not entirely told on the three enchanted canvases. In fact, the paintings and the journals complement each other—Émile and Cecile—their art combining to tell the most fantastical story that Paris has never known existed. The fact that the fucking circus was created so that one of the most powerful daemons in history could find a babysitter for his twin daughters is a tale so absurd that, in the end, no one would believe it.

Giroux is back in fashion these days, so I was asked to update my biography on him. At the end, I found myself struggling yet again on the Ladies of the Secret Circus chapter. The three paintings only proved that Giroux had painted a circus; they failed to validate Le Cirque Secret’s existence. Nothing will ever prove that something so truly fantastic and surreal was once a part of Paris’s fabric. How do you really prove magic? And in the end, do you really want to?

I confess that, for me, something was lost in the quest. Some mystery about the world has been answered, but the solution has dulled something deep in me. Solving mysteries didn’t get me closer to anything. For you, I know it was the loss of your mother. I think of her so often. How she came to Paris to rescue you.