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enough to buy two second-class tickets.
    La Barberie. Le Moulin d’Etrelles. La Framboisière. The words reemerge intact, like the bodies of those two fiancés found in the mountains, encased in ice, who hadn’t aged in hundreds of years. La Barberie. That was the name of the house, and I can still see its white, symmetrical façade between rows of trees. Three years ago, traveling by train, I was distractedly perusing the classifieds in a newspaper, noticing that there were far fewer than back when I used to copy them into my black notebook. No more help wanted or offered. No more lost dogs. No more psychics. None of those messages strangers would send each other: “Martine. Call us. Yvon, Juanita, and I are very concerned.” But one ad had caught my eye: “For sale. Vintage home. Eure-et-Loir. In hamlet between Châteauneuf and Brezolles. Park. Ponds. Stables. Call Paccardy Agency (02-07) 33-71-22.” I thought I recognized the house. I copied the ad at the bottom of the last page of my old black notebook, as a sort of conclusion. Still, those stables didn’t ring a bell. There were indeed ponds—or rather, pools in which the dog used to splash about during our walks. La Barberie was the name not only of the house but also of the hamlet, of which the house must once have been the chateau. All around were sections of half-crumbled walls beneath the vegetation, no doubt the ruins of a manor house and a chapel, and even, why not, of a stable. One afternoon when we were walking with the dog—it was thanks to him we discovered those ruins; he guided us toward them gradually, like a truffle hound—we were talking about all the repairs we would make, as if we owned the place. Perhaps Dannie didn’t dare tell me that, centuries before, the house had actually belonged to her ancestors, the lords of La Barberie. And she had long wanted to come back to visit it in secret. At least, that’s what I liked to imagine.
    At La Barberie, I forgot around a hundred pages of a manuscript I was writing from the notes in my black book. Or rather, I had left the manuscript in the living room where I worked, thinking we’d be back the following week. But we were never able to return, and we abandoned the dog and the manuscript there forever.
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    Now and then over the years, I have thought about retrieving that manuscript, the way you recover a souvenir—one of those objects connected with a moment in your life, like a dried flower or four-leaf clover. But I no longer knew where the country house was. And I was overcome by lethargy and a vague apprehension when leafing through my old black notebook; moreover, it took me a long while to discover the name of the village and the phone number, written as they were in such tiny script.
    Today I’m no longer afraid of that notebook. It helps me to “scan my past,” and that expression makes me smile. It was from the title of a novel,
A Man Scans His Past,
that I’d come across in the library of the house—several shelves of books next to one of the windows in the living room. The past? No, it’s not about the past, but about episodes in a timeless, idealized life, which I wrest page by page from my drab current existence to give it some light and shadow. This afternoon, we are in the here and now, it’s raining, people and things are plunged in gray, and I’m impatiently waiting for night, when everything will stand out more sharply, thanks to those same contrasts of shadow and light.
    The other night, driving through Paris, I was moved by those lights and shadows, by the different varieties of streetlights and lampposts, which I felt were sending me signals from the avenues or street corners. It was the same feeling you get from staring at a lit window: a feeling of both presence and absence. Behind the glass pane the room is empty, but someone has left the light on. For me, there has never been a