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present or a past. Everything blends together, as in that empty room where, every night, a light shines. I often dream that I’ve found my manuscript. I walk into the living room with its black-and-white-tiled floor and rummage through the drawers under the bookshelves. Or else a mysterious correspondent, whose name I can’t quite make out on the envelope next to the word “sender,” mails it to me. And the postmark shows the year when we used to go to that house in the country, Dannie and I. But I’m not surprised that the package took so long to arrive—for indeed there is no past or present. Thanks to my jottings in the black notebook, I can recall several chapters of that manuscript: one devoted to Baroness Blanche; another to Marie-Anne Leroy, guillotined on July 26, 1794, aged twenty-one; still others to the Hôtel Radziwill during the Revolution, to Jeanne Duval, to Tristan Corbière and his friends Rodolphe de Battine and Herminie Cucchiani . . . None of those pages concerned the twentieth century, in which I was living. And yet, if I could read them again, the exact colors and smells of the nights and days when I wrote them would come back to me. Judging from what is in the black notebook, the Hôtel Radziwill in 1791 was not so different from the Unic Hôtel on Rue du Montparnasse: the same dodgy atmosphere. And now that I think of it, didn’t Dannie have something in common with Baroness Blanche? I had a very hard time retracing that woman’s steps. One often loses sight of her, even though she appears in Casanova’s
Memoirs,
which I was reading at the time, and in several police reports under Louis XV. Have police inspectors really changed since the eighteenth century? One day, Duwelz and Gérard Marciano confided to me under their breath that the Unic Hôtel was both kept under surveillance and protected by an inspector from the vice squad. He, too, surely wrote reports. And, more than twenty years later, among the documents in the file that Langlais gave me—I was genuinely surprised that he hadn’t forgotten me in all those years; “not at all,” he said with a smile, “I’ve been keeping an eye on you from a distance”—figured a report about Dannie, written up with the same precision as the ones from two centuries earlier concerning Baroness Blanche.
    All things considered, I don’t regret losing that manuscript. If it hadn’t disappeared, I don’t think I’d want to write today. Time is abolished and everything starts anew: once again I’m filling pages, with the same kind of pen and the same handwriting, consulting the jottings in my old black notebook as I did before. It has taken me almost an entire lifetime to return to my point of departure.
    Last night, I again dreamed that I went to the post office and stood at the window, holding a claim check with my name on it. In exchange, they handed me a parcel, and I knew in advance what it contained: the manuscript left behind at La Barberie in the last century. This time I could read the sender’s name: Mme Dorme. La Barberie. Feuilleuse. Eure-et-Loir. And the postmark was from the year 1966. In the street, I opened the parcel, and it was indeed my manuscript. I had forgotten that at the time I used squared paper that I tore out sheet by sheet from orange-covered pads made by the Rhodia company. The ink was aqua blue—that, too, I’d forgotten. Ninety-nine pages, the last of which was unfinished. Tight handwriting, with many cross-outs.
    I walked straight ahead, clutching the manuscript under my arm. I was afraid of losing it. A late summer afternoon. I followed Rue de la Convention toward the black façade and fences of Boucicaut Hospital.
    When I awoke, I realized that the post office where I’d gone to collect the parcel in my dream was the same one where I often used to accompany Dannie. She got her mail there. I had asked her why she