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circumstances I stumbled up into the Belvedere, at the end of a long walk through the gardens below. I had not known the place was there and I found it by complete accident, but once I had arrived I liked it. The view, as I have mentioned, is spectacular, and the steep ascent discourages most tourists, though there is a road running up the back of the hill. There were some sightseers I had to share the hilltop with, but not too many of them.
    I stood for ten or fifteen minutes by a parapet overlooking the city, luxuriating in the panorama, and then began to walk slowly around the inside of the walls. I was walking clockwise, and Lauren, whose name I did not yet know, was walking counterclockwise. In this way we passed each other about five times. Each time I looked at her, glanced at her, she kept looking better and better.
    On the sixth pass she spoke.
    “Are you following me?”
    We’d both been up there an hour at the least. Lauren was speaking French. I replied in some semblance of the same tongue.
    “No. But it would be a great temptation to do so. “
    I walked on; she walked on. This was almost all the French I knew.
    Eventually I sat down on one of the outer parapets. I thought that she would probably return that way, since it was the direction which led to the city. I had my back to where she must be, however. I was very casual. I smoked a cigarette, then another, looking out at the profile of the Duomo. A hand touched me in the small of the back and I almost fell in the river. I just barely saved myself by locking my legs hard around the wall.
    So much for my savoir-faire. When I collected myself enough to look around I saw Lauren a few paces away, cracking up. She was laughing like a loon.
    “What’s your favorite language?” I said, expending the very last of the French I had in store. It turned out to be English, luckily or unluckily for me.
    Lauren was an extraordinary beauty, in truth and fact and without prejudice, the sort that grows on you slowly and never quits. Others of her admirers compared her to the works of Botticelli, and the simile was not without justification, though it got old fast, especially when it was suggested by persons other than myself. But Lauren did share the fine lines, the clear articulation of feature, specifically of the Botticelli Venus, which was enshrined in the Uffizi just down the hill and across the river. Though Lauren was considerably less vapid than the girl on the half shell there. She wasn’t a goddess; she was a woman, and her humanity added a great deal to the lines Botticelli might have drawn and most certainly would have admired. It made her more beautiful and more dangerous as well, much more so in both cases than any painting could ever be.
    I learned, those first few days in Florence, not much at all about Lauren. So far as her own taste ran, the outward circumstances of her life were utterly without interest or importance. I did learn that she was a British citizen but had spent most of her childhood on the Continent, mainly in Switzerland; she was the second daughter of a diplomatic family. She had an undergraduate degree from Radcliffe, had been to acting school in New York, and did occasional modeling work. Her passport listed a London address. At the time that I met her, Lauren was twenty-two.
    Lauren’s Italian was very good and she knew Florence much better than I did. For two days she conducted me on an unorthodox tour of the city, disappearing a trifle mysteriously at the end of each evening; she would not allow me to escort her home. On the third night she came back with me to my hotel, though I had not suggested it. There, for two or three more nights, we shared a smallish bed, without touching, as though there were a sword between us. I won’t say that I was shy, just curious to see what she would do if I left her to her own devices. It’s also possible that my subconscious early warning system was already in effect. It was she who turned to me