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my attention on Dora Bruder, and perhaps, I
told myself, of elucidating or divining something about her,
a place where she had been, a detail of her life. When it came
to her parents, and the circumstances of her escape, I was
completely ignorant. All I had to go on was this: I had seen
her name, BRUDER DORA —nothing else, no date or place of
birth—above that of her father— BRUDER ERNEST , 21.5.99,
Vienna. Stateless. —on the list of those dispatched on the
transport that had left on 18 September 1942 for Auschwitz.
    I was thinking, when writing Voyage de noces , of certain
women whom I knew in the sixties, women like Anne B.,
Bella D.—the same age as Dora, one of them almost to the
month—who, during the Occupation, were in the same
situation and might have shared her fate, and whom she probably
resembled. Today, it occurs to me that I had had to write two
hundred pages before I captured, unconsciously, a vague
gleam of the truth.
    It was a matter of a few words: “The terminus was Nation.
Rigaud and Ingrid had allowed Bastille, the stop where they
should have changed for Porte Dorée, to go by. Emerging from
the exit, they were confronted by a vast expanse of
snow.  .  .  .The
sleigh cut through the back streets to reach the Boulevard
Soult.”
    These back streets lay behind the Rue de Picpus and the
Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school from which Dora
Bruder made her escape, one December evening when it was
probably snowing in Paris.
    That was the only moment in the book when, without
knowing it, I came close to her in space and time.

.................
    T HUS WE FIND NEXT TO DORA BRUDER’S NAME IN THE school register, under the heading “Date and reason for
departure”: “14 December 1941. Pupil has run away.”
    It was a Sunday. I imagine that she would have taken
advantage of the free day to visit her parents. That evening, she
failed to return to the school.
    Those dying weeks of the year were the blackest, most
claustrophobic period that Paris had experienced since the
beginning of the Occupation. Between 8 and 14 December,
in reprisal for two assassination attempts, the Germans
ordered a curfew from six o’clock in the evening. Next came the
roundup of seven hundred French Jews on 12 December; and
the fine of one billion francs levied on the Jewish community
as a whole. And then, on the morning of the same day, the
shooting of seventy hostages at the Mont-Valérien fortress.
On 10 December, by order of the Prefect of Police, French and
foreign Jews living in the department of the Seine had to
submit to “periodic checks,” producing special identity cards
stamped “Jew” or “Jewess.” Henceforth they were forbidden
to travel outside the department, and any change of address
had to be registered at a police station.
    In the 18th arrondissement, a curfew imposed by the
Germans had been in force since 1 December. Nobody could
enter the area after six o’clock at night. Local métro stations were
closed, including Simplon, the one nearest to where Ernest
and Cécile Bruder lived. A hand grenade had been thrown in
the Rue Championnet, very close to their hotel.
    The curfew lasted three days. No sooner had it been lifted
than the Germans imposed another throughout the entire
10th arrondissement, where, on the Boulevard Magenta,
persons unknown had fired at an officer of the occupying
authorities. Then came the general curfew of 8 to 14
December—the Sunday of Dora’s escape.
    Around the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie boarding school, as the
lights were extinguished in district after district, the city
became a dark prison. While Dora was behind the high walls of
60–62 Rue de Picpus, her parents were confined to their
hotel room.
    Her father having failed to declare her a “Jewess” in
October 1940, she had not been allotted a “Jewish dossier”
number. But the decree issued by the Prefecture of