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in a police roundup coming out of the George-V metro stop, he’d been sitting in the subway across from a brown-haired man in a dark suit. At first he’d taken him for a regular passenger but, a few minutes later, the man was among the team of plainclothesmen who were bringing them in to the lockup, he and about ten others. He had vaguely sensed the man following him in the subway corridors. Gil the Mime, with his black suit, reminded him of that plainclothesman.
    He was still following us, hands in his pockets. I heard him whistling a tune that used to terrify me when I was a child: “There Was a Little Ship.”
    We took a sidewalk table at the café where I’d first met Jansen. The other man stopped when he caught up to us and folded his arms. Jansen pointed at him for me.
    “He’s as clingy as that cop from twenty years ago,” he said. “For all we know, maybe it’s him.”
    The sun was blinding. In the harsh, shimmering light, a black spot was floating in front of us. It came closer. Now Gil the Mime stoodout against the glare. Was he going to perform one of his shadow pantomimes for us, to a poem by Tristan Corbière?
    He stood there, next to our table. Then he shrugged his shoulders and with an arrogant air strode off toward the Denfert-Rochereau metro stop.
    “It’s time for me to leave Paris,” Jansen said. “This is all getting too tiresome and absurd.”

The more I remember these details, the more I adopt Jansen’s point of view. In the few weeks when I knew him, he considered people and things from a great distance, and all that remained for him were vague reference points and hazy silhouettes. And, through a kind of reciprocity, those people and things lost their consistency on contact with him. Could Gil the Mime and his wife still be alive somewhere? Try as I might to convince myself and imagine the following situation, I can’t really believe in it: thirty years later, I run into them in Paris; the three of us have grown older; we sit at a sidewalk café table and calmly share our memories of Jansen and the spring of 1964. Everything that seemed so mysterious to me becomes clear and even ordinary.
    Such as the evening when Jansen had gotten together with several friends in the studio, just before leaving for Mexico—a “farewell party,” he said with a laugh …
    Remembering that evening, I feel a need to latch onto those elusive silhouettes and capture them as if in a photograph. But after so many years, outlines become blurred, and a creeping, insidious doubt corrodes the faces. So many proofs and witnesses can disappear in thirty years. And besides, I had felt even at the time that the contact between Jansen and his friends had already loosened. He would never see them again and he didn’t seem to mind. They were probably surprised Jansen had invited them at all, after not having heard from him in so long. Conversations started and almost immediately died. And Jansen seemed so absent, he who should have been the point incommon for all those people … It was as if they’d found themselves by chance in the same waiting room. The small number of them only accentuated the malaise: four, sitting very far apart from one another. Jansen had set up a buffet, which added to the strangeness of the evening. Now and then, someone stood up and walked to the buffet to get a glass of whiskey or a cracker, and the others’ silence enshrouded the event in an exceptional solemnity.
    Among the guests at the “farewell party” were the Meyendorffs, a couple in their fifties whom Jansen had known for a long time: I’d catalogued a photo in which they figured in a garden with Colette Laurent. The man was dark, slim, with fine features, and wearing tinted glasses. He spoke in a very soft voice and was nice to me, even asking what I planned to do in life. He had been a doctor, but I don’t believe he still practiced. His wife, a small brunette, with hair pulled back in a bun and high cheekbones, had the