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how it is with the last-born child. He knows himself to be the product of middle age and its disillusionment, and that this is why there are so few photographs of him as a baby, and why as a child he was left so much to his own devices or, worse, at the mercy of his siblings, who tortured him. The last-born child must learn to fend for himself. He has no choice. And Julia’s case was worse, because to the burden of being the youngest was added that of being a daughter in a world that favored sons. Hence the single-mindedness, the bleakness of prospect, the tenacity that were the signal features of her character.
    Of course, when I first met her I saw none of this. Rather, what I saw was a creature at once fleet and nervous, like those tiny deer you sometimes startle in the woods in the Florida Keys. The very night we met, she asked me to take her back to my room—and it was a revelation. All my life, I saw, I had been looking, in the absence of any pressing desire or goal, for a purposefulness outside myself on which I might, as it were, ride piggyback. It could havebeen a religion, it could have been a political party, it could have been a collection of musical instruments made from shoeshine boxes. Instead it was Julia. I adored her, I wanted her, and if I didn’t yet know her—well, what of it? Do you really need to know something to know that it enchants you? (Probably you do. Good luck, though, in convincing a young person of this.) Of course, there were signs I should have heeded. She lied to me about her age. She said she was twenty-four when really she was twenty-nine—three years older than I was. Also she had no friends, or at least none to whom she ever introduced me. As for her family, she said that she despised them and was living with her mother only until she could afford to flee. They were crass—whereas she valued art; had taken lessons in painting and pottery and singing; had tried her hand at writing a novel. But none of the paintings satisfied her, her pots kept falling off the wheel, and she gave up the singing when her teacher told her she had to quit smoking. As for the novel, she could not stop rewriting the first chapter. At the end of a year she had generated nine hundred pages, all of them first chapters.
    Now she had an idée fixe, and it was to live in Paris. Only in Paris, she believed, could the artistic impulse that New York had frustrated take root and bloom. I asked her how many times she had been to Paris, and she said that she had never been there once. A trip with two of her sisters had been planned for the summer of 1914, but the war had interrupted. (She never forgave the war for it.) Luckily, she happened to have a French governess at the time, a prematurely elderly young woman who in the evenings would read aloud to her from the Comtesse de Ségur’s
Les Malheurs de Sophie
, that work by which, for mysterious reasons, so many little girls of the period were entranced. It was from Sophie, Julia said, that she gleaned her earliest notions of a French self, as well as her earliest conviction that she was destined to reside in Paris—a conviction that onlygrew as she grew, and moved from the misadventures of Sophie to those of Colette’s Claudine, of which her governess disapproved strenuously and which were, for that reason, all the more enticing. Now I have before me Julia’s copy of
Claudine in Paris
. The pages are brittle and puffy, for she had a habit of reading in the bath. Many passages are underlined, including this one:
    “We were sitting at a little table, against a pillar. To my right, under a panel daubed tempestuously with naked Bacchantes, a mirror assured me that I had no ink on my cheek, that my hat was on straight and that my eyes were dancing above a mouth red with thirst, perhaps a little fever. Renaud, sitting opposite me, had shaky hands and moist temples.
    “A little moan of covetousness escaped me, aroused by the trail of scent left by a passing dish of