He walks back to the hotel, telling himself that the fresh air will do him good and, in fact, the rhythm of his shoes on the cement does bring calm-a man in a boy’s shoes-as does the sight, a mere two streets away, of people selling melons and entering cafés. A well-brushed dog dances on a leash; its owner dances along behind. Every face Roy sees is clothed with the dumb shine of ignorance. He wonders, already he wonders, how he will describe this scene to Meg; he remembers nothing but the old guard tipping his capacious belly toward him and saying, “You must leave the museum.” And how he ran stumbling out of the museum door into the courtyard. He is emptied out, light-headed, agonizingly alert. He feels he’s been as close to the edge of his life as he’s ever likely to be.

Meg and Roy Sloan will not always be sitting here at a little square table in La Petite Fourchette dining on marinated crab, roasted lamb cutlets with green beans, followed by a selection of cheeses, followed by sorbet cassis, followed by coffee and by two glasses of brilliantly colored cognac. The authentic world will sweep them away, attributing their brief incandescence to the lamplight or the shift of weather or the conjoined sense of having escaped what they didn’t even know they dreaded.

“Of course you ran,” pretty Meg Sloan says to her husband. “Anyone would run. There’s nothing shameful about wanting to save your own life. I mean, there’s nothing selfish about it or cowardly. If the house were on fire, you’d run out of it, wouldn’t you? I know I would. I’d run like crazy.”

Her shopping expedition to north Paris has failed. The warehouse, when she finally found it, had been filled with tourists much like herself, women of about her own age and size and possessed of the same financial ease and concentrated fervor. These women carried, too, the accumulated heft of discouragement; the clothes offered for sale were ugly and soiled and brought to mind instances of similar discouragement. Meg tried on one two-hundred-dollar dress that transformed her into an aged dwarf and brought tears to her eyes.

Her diminutive size, her chief vanity, seemed all at once shameful, contrived and unwholesome. She fled to a nearby post office and placed a long-distance call to her daughter in Milwaukee. The call went through quickly, much to her surprise, and caught Jenny in the throes of packing-she had patched things up with Kenneth; an understanding had been reached, a compromise of sorts, and she and the children were about to return to Green Bay. The weather in Wisconsin was glorious, frost at night, but temperatures in the daytime that qualified as Indian summer. The shrubs in the front yard had just started to turn.