At dinner on a late September evening on a terrace adjoining the Renaissance house where Raphael’s mistress, La Fornarina, was said to have lived, dining superbly and drinking the good wine of the Old World, Segre’s New World seemed irresistibly attractive to Marguerite. The doctor, his wife, and Alberto could have their stasis. Upper and outer mobility was what she was after. Freedom.

There is no worse evil, said Sartre, than raising a specific into a generalization, an abstraction. Transforming, for instance, any faith from the art of the possible into a fixed concept. Jung had said it, too—no concept is a carrier of life.

“It’s a terrible thing to be left without belief,” her mother was saying from long ago. “Even when they’re not perfect, they give meaning to life.”

With Marguerite, like Simple Simon, to reply: “No, I think freedom is better than any faith. And ‘meaning in life’—the more you pursue it, the more it escapes you. All we have is choice, each time over and over again.”

But, her mind told her, if you make freedom your belief, you’re back to the same thing.

Perhaps she was.

When Alberto came to her room and said, “We’re due at court tomorrow morning,” she had a moment of panic. How do you walk away after eighteen years? Shaking hands and saying ciao? Do you thank him for the good times? Do you run?

At nine in the morning, punctually, they entered the great Palace of Justice, in a stream of short, dark, southern lawyers who were duly saluted—Buon giorno, avvocato. . . . Rispetti, avvocá. . . . Eccellenza, buon giorno—by the guards and ushers on duty. A great cold mole, pompous and forbidding on the outside and squalid within; Justice as a concept. A figure of Italia, crown on head and sword in hand, watched those who, caught, oppressed, fraught with anxieties, the upsetters of the status-quo applecart—the outsiders and sidestreamers—entered the Palazzo di Giustizia to have justice meted out to them.

Panic passed into exhilaration. The months of shabby bickering had dissolved, and on that spring day of late March, hard by the bridge of the angels and Castel Sant’Angelo, where she had strolled years ago with Alberto who courted her reading Laforgue, she went to be certified free.

Dr. Verdile had never understood the need for, as he put it, “all those papers and documents.” Marguerite, too, would have preferred a simple dissolution of marriage; she was perfectly aware of the sublime nonsense of her yearning for a freedom that had to be ratified by a court of justice and stated on a piece of notarized paper. That was Dr. V.’s point: If she were really free, inwardly, she wouldn’t need authorization to do what she wanted. But first things first—she might still get there eventually.