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specter of Stavisky. Dreariness of the Lido. Dismal ports of call, Fouquet and the Colisée. Everything was phony from the start. Place de la Concorde, you're sporting lizard shoes, a polka-dot tie, and the smug assurance of a little gigolo. After turning off into the MadeleineOpéra district, just as tawdry as the Champs-Élysées, you continue your journey and what the doctor calls your MOR-AL DIS-IN-TE-GRA-TION beneath the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. The Continental, the Meurice, the SaintJames et d'Albany, where I work as a hotel thief. The wealthy guests occasionally have me up to their rooms. Before it's light, I rifle their handbags and lift a few pieces of jewelry. Farther along. Rumpelmayer's, with its odors of withered flesh. The fags you assault at night in the Carrousel gardens just to filch suspenders and wallets. But the vision suddenly looms clearer: I'm right in the belly of Paris. Where exactly are its borders? All you have to do is cross the Rue du Louvre or the Place du Palais Royal. You head toward Les Hailes down narrow, fetid streets. The belly of Paris is a jungle striped with motley neon signs. All around you, overturned vegetable crates and ghostly figures wheeling giant haunches of carcass. A cluster of wan and weirdly painted faces surge up, then vanish. From here on, anything is possible. They'll rope you into the dirtiest jobs before letting you have the final payoff. And if, by some desperate, cunning subterfuge, one more last-ditch act of cowardice, you wriggle clear of this horde of foul-mouthed fishwives and butchers lurking in the shadows, you'll go on to die just up the street, on the far side of the Boulevard Sébastopol, right there in that vacant lot. That wasteland. The doctor said so. You've reached your journey's end, and there's no turning back. Too late. The trains aren't running. Our Sunday walks along the Petite Ceinture, the railway line that's idle now … It took us in full circle around Paris. Porte de Clignancourt. Boulevard Pereire. Porte Dauphine. Farther on, Javel…..The stations along the loop had been converted into depots or bars. Some of them had been left intact, and I could almost picture a train coming by any minute, yet for the last fifty years the hands of the clock have never moved. I've always had a special feeling about the Gare d'Orsay, to the point that I wait there for the pale blue Pullmans that speed you to the Promised Land. And since they never appear, I walk across the Pont Solferino whistling a waltz tune. Then I take from my wallet a photograph of Dr. Marcel Petiot in the defense box and, behind him, that whole pile of suitcases crammed with hopes and thwarted plans, while the judge, pointing to them, asks me: "What have you made of your youth?" and my attorney (my mother, as it happened, for no one else would undertake my defense) tries to convince him and the jury that I was "nonetheless a promising youngster," "an ambitious lad," slated for a "brilliant career," so everyone said. "The proof, Your Honor, is that the luggage, over there behind him, is impeccable. Russia leather, Your Honor." "Why should I give a damn about those suitcases, Madame, since they never went anywhere?" And every last one of them condemned me to death. Tonight, you must go to bed early. Tomorrow the whorehouse will be packed solid. Don't forget your make-up and lipstick. Rehearse it once more in the mirror: you must wink your eye with velvety smoothness. You'll run across a lot of perverts who'll want you to do unspeakable things. Those depraved creatures frighten me. If I don't satisfy them, they'll wipe me out. Why didn't she shout: " LONG LIVE THE NATION " ? When it's my turn, I'll repeat it as often as they want. I'm the most accommodating whore. "Come on now, drink up," Zieff pleads with me. "Some music?" suggests Violette Morris. The Khedive comes over to me, smiling: "The Lieutenant will be here in ten minutes. Say hello to him as if nothing were up." "Something