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guesthouse. It was as decadent as the manor house, only in miniature. We passed through it quickly and then followed a path into the forest. There was a fertility here that could not be stopped, trees growing out of other trees, wild orchids sprouting like weeds. We fought our way along the trail, and eventually we arrived at a small stone villa. The villa was far less formal than even the guesthouse—the ceilings lower, the rooms more modest—but the materials from which it was constructed were no less formidable; I was no less in awe.
    And still there was more. How much more, I could not yet conceive. We spent hours wandering the estate, and we saw just a portion. Behind the manor house there was a compound of outbuildings, where a staff of servants had once lived and worked. M. Guinee told me of natural springs and a small waterfall buried deep among the trees, but he said even he no longer knew where to find them. They had been reclaimed by the forest. At that moment, I could imagine the same thing happening to me—the trees reaching out to abduct me with their gnarled arms—and I knew I would not fight it.
    â€œI remember stories my mother used to tell me,” I said as we paused to rest on the manor house steps. “They were stories my grandmother had told her. About how long before even her mother was born, a man could reach up wherever he stood and pluck a piece of fruit. The whole island was a garden. My mother said it was paradise. Until now, I never really knew what she meant.”
    M. Guinee nodded.
    â€œI had no idea there was anything like this here.”
    â€œNo one does.”
    Much of the rest of what I saw passed in a blur, as I reached and then surpassed my ability to take in new things. Despite the eagerness with which I listened to M. Guinee’s explanations, I retained none of it. As soon as we got back in the car, I fell asleep in exhaustion. I awoke again much later, midway up the road to Lyonville, and I felt a sudden panic as it occurred to me that I had paid insufficient attention to the route we had taken to get to Habitation Louvois, and I had slept through the return, and now I would never be able to find my way back.
    T hat evening, after M. Guinee dropped me off at Senator and Mme Marcus’s house, I pressed my face to the glass of my small attic window and looked to the south, retracing as best I could our course along the bay and up into the valley, and for the first time I noticed a tiny patch of intense green on the otherwise anemic hillside.
    I realized how small and cloistered my life up until now had been, how meager my ambitions, and it saddened me to think how modest even the lives of the Marcuses would seem to me now. I began to regret ever having gone with M. Guinee. Now that I had discovered a whole new world, how could everything that came after not be a disappointment?

Chapter Four
    O n Wednesdays, Senator Marcus and I left the office at ten o’clock in the morning for his weekly tennis match on the courts at the Hotel Erdrich. His opponents varied from week to week, but his doubles partner was always M. Rossignol, the minister of health. The minister of health was a singularly unpleasant man, cursed with a short temper and long arms and a comical tendency to wave the latter when demonstrating the former. Of the two, M. Rossignol was the better player, a fact Senator Marcus himself was never ashamed to admit. But Senator Marcus liked to say—and he said it often—that what he lacked in skill he made up for in heart. Senator Marcus scurried after every ball, regardless of his likelihood of catching up with it. The shots he did manage to return he hit with a grunt that seemed to contain all the strength he could muster, though the results seldom bore this out. No matter how many balls he returned into the net, nor how many glanced off the outer frame of his racket in unexpected directions, he never lost his temper. Not once can I