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them from years of footsteps shuffling up and down. Some days I find this a comfort, that some of those feet will have belonged to other lovers, that Adèle and I are not the only ones who have used this hotel to rendezvous. But other days I find this depressing. All those years. All those people moving up and down the staircase, moving through the rooms of this hotel. Their love unremembered.
    Sometimes, when we are lying naked in the bed of our rented room, I think of all the other couples who have been in the room for the same purpose. What happened to them? What happened to their love? I wish there were a private registry of the lovers who frequented each room; a listing of two names – names that were not permitted to be joined together in any other circumstance. At least something would then remain to remind us of the lovers, to remind us that they loved.
    Adèle and I contribute to this private registry by signing our names in each of the rooms we stay in. Our joined signatures, small and discreet, behind a picture, or under the washstand. Charles and Adèle. Invisible, but there nonetheless, if you choose to look.
    Today we have been given a room on the fourth floor. The narrow stairs curl up and up. We have to walk in single file. We struggle up, pausing for breath at each landing. By the time we reach the room we are hot and irritable. I fling the door open. Adèle stumbles across the threshold.
    In the Hôtel Saint-Paul, the rooms on the higher floors have lower ceilings than the rooms on the first and second floor. But the ceilings are timbered, and this makes up for their lack of height. This room, like all the others we have stayed in, has a bed against one wall, a washstand against another, a small desk, and a window that looks down over the roof and courtyard of the Collège Royal Saint-Louis.
    Adèle collapses on the bed, still struggling for breath. It occurs to me, rather meanly, that she’s grown stouter of late. I stare moodily out the window, not feeling very loving. And yet I have waited an entire month for this afternoon in the hotel.
    “Well?” says Adèle. She has propped herself up on her elbows, stares across the room at me. “Are you going to stand there all day?”
    Perhaps I love Adèle better in absentia? There is nothing finer than imagining our time together in this hotel room, but now that we’re actually here I feel paralyzed by my expectations. Why is love so difficult, so changeable? Why am I caught so easily in its tides and currents? Why can’t I steer the craft of my own desire?
    “I am a boat,” I say to Adèle.
    “What?”
    “I am a dark boat cast down the dark length of the river.”
    She giggles. “You are an idiot,” she says. “Do I have to come over there to make you love me?”
    Adèle’s body and my body are similarly plump. We are just over thirty, but our figures are decidedly middle-aged. Adèle’s figure has not been helped by giving birth to five children. (Of these, four are living, one having died shortly after he wasborn.) My figure is not helped by my predilection for sweets and my aversion to exercise. Adèle said once that we look better clothed, and I would have to agree with her. But, that said, there is something wonderfully liberating about removing my clothes in the middle of the afternoon to lie naked with my lover in a rented hotel room.
    It puts me in a better humour, for one thing.
    We lie on our backs, naked, holding hands tightly, as though we are survivors from a shipwreck, floating on a makeshift raft over the stormy seas while waiting to be rescued. We are too shy to look at each other, too shy to give full expression to our desire. We have waited so long to be together like this that the fact we are actually here takes some getting used to.
    “If you could change one thing in this room,” says Adèle, “what would it be?”
    “The room itself,” I say. “I would have it be our room in our house, not a room in a hotel.”
    “How