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through the air.
    I dream, aware that I am dreaming. I can actually see myself sleeping. It is a strange sensation – gentle and euphoric.
    Suddenly, although I remember closing the door and locking it, I hear the handle turn, the hinges creak, and the door slowly opens. The figure of a woman is visible in the feeble light from the corridor. I cannot yet make out her face but I recognise her immediately: it is the stranger from the steamer. She is dressed in a green silk tunic, her feet are bare and her blond hair floats over her shoulders as if held up by invisible fingers. Her presence casts a milky light on the objects around her.
    As she moves into the room, my heart begins to beat so hard it almost jumps out of my chest. I would like her to come up to me, to sit down and take my hand. Instead, she heads towards the window, picks up a sheet of paper and a pencil lying on the table and slowly returns to the bed and lays them on the floor.
    She stares at me without blinking. She is even more beautiful than I remembered. I feel she is about to leave me; I want to talk to her, implore her to stay a few more minutes but I have barely opened my mouth before she puts her fingers to my lips and commands my silence. Her skin is soft, surprisingly soft.
    Then she steps away from me, still without uttering a word. As she moves towards the corridor, she repeatedly points to the objects on the floor. The sheet of paper and the pencil.
    Before disappearing, she smiles at me as if to console me, encouraging me to be patient, telling me that she will come back. I follow her with my eyes until she’s gone. Then the noise of the door closing wakes me up.  
NOTES UPON WAKING
    1. As I recall, the sheet of paper and the pencil were on the table last night. But memories can be deceptive; this one must be deceptive. Without realising it, I put them at the end of the bed before going to sleep.
    2. The sexual charge of the dream is undeniable and is not unknown in the malaise afflicting me. But why did the young woman insist that I record the contents of the dream on paper?
    3. (Note added at 8.15 a.m.) Took a long time to fall asleep again. When I got up, I checked that the bedroom door was locked. It was.
     
    In the morning, I bought a notebook at a shop on Rue Saint-Honoré and then sat outside a café where I wrote up the dream properly,having scribbled it down at three o’clock in the morning almost automatically, together with the observations I had forced myself to record with as much clarity as I could at the time.
    This I christened my dream notebook. It would come to play an important role throughout my life.
    Clearly, dreams were to be significant during my time in Paris. Having come to find out the real cause of the death of Gérard de Nerval, for whom dreams and reality had constantly merged recklessly, I myself was now experiencing the ambiguous nature of the realm of dreams, at once so alluring and so pernicious.
    Just for a moment, feeling suddenly fearful, I almost turned back and took the first train to London. But, as I was leaving the café, somewhere a bell chimed eleven o’clock and I instinctively hurried in the direction of the Seine, cut through the Tuileries Gardens and, crossing Pont du Carrousel, reached the Gare d’Orsay where Fourier and his constable, Dupuytren, were waiting for me on the platform for the express train to Orléans.
    Notes
    7 The Stavisky affair, which had come to light in December 1933, was still on everyone’s minds. Denounced by the press, the scandal of false credit bonds at Crédit Municipal in Bayonne had led to the fall of the Chautemps government. The investigation had revealed numerous fraudulent relationships between the police, the justice system and politicians. (Publisher’s note)
    8 On 9 October, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Louis Barthou, was killed in an attack committed by a Croatian nationalist organisation, along with King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, whom he had gone to