She serves it herself in porcelain that, I am relieved to see, was not made by convicts. She tells me . . . well, I'm not conscious of much more than the music of her voice. I'm dimly aware of the concussion of spoons . . . a settee, a sisal rug . . . and finally a natural history cabinet, empty except for a few seashells and a line of red morocco bindings.

"Ah, you are coveting my library," she says in an ironical tone. "Those are the memoirs of my late husband, the Baron. He was ambassador to Berlin under Louis the Sixteenth."

Not knowing how to answer this, I say nothing, and this proves to be the very signal she was waiting for. Setting her teacup down, she folds her hands in her lap and, with a conscientious and abiding air, as if she were showing visitors round a house, begins to speak. And all the facts that should have been elicited after days, even weeks of small talk and trust building come tumbling out now in a helpless profusion.

"We lost everything, of course, during the Revolution. The Jacobins nationalized our lands, that much we were expecting, but then most of my jewels were lost on the way to Warsaw, and the Baron made rather a hash of the money we had left. He made a rather poor emigre, given how accustomed he was to travel. Voluntary exile was one thing, he used to say, involuntary quite another. He chafed, poor thing. Always intriguing to come back here, where he was least wanted."

She picks up her cup, rests it brief ly on her underlip.

"Intrigues, I am sad to say, cost money. At least his always did."

With a rush of undercoats, she rises. Opens the cabinet with a scant pressure of hand, strokes the morocco bindings.

"This is what's left of his estate. A life in ten volumes. To the end, he was persuaded that someone would publish it." She takes the leftmost volume in her hand, holds it out to me. "This one might be to your taste, Doctor. It follows the Baron from his nativity in Toulon to his brief and, if I may say, unexceptional term as intendant of the Limousin." She rubs the spine with her knuckles. "I find it is the only volume I can bear to read myself. The others fall a little too near to home. Why, good morning, puss-puss! "

I feel it before I see it: a friction against my trouser leg. Then an unstable spectrum of black and white and orange, bounding into the Baroness's open arms.

"Is puss-puss just waking up? What a sleepy puss it is! It's the fog, isn't it? Yes, puss-puss loves the fog, doesn't he? Come see, can you see?"

In the shadows of the sconce light, they become, brief ly, a unitary organism: limbs coiled toward a common purpose, murmurs twining with mewls.

"I'm afraid I must pose an indelicate question," she says.

It's some time before I realize she is talking to me. Her voice hasn't quite come back to its human register.

"If you like," I stammer.

"Were you followed?"

"No."

Such a ring of conviction in my voice, and the truth is I have no clue. I'm still getting used to the idea that I'm worth following.

"It is my turn to be indelicate, Madame la Baronne."

"By all means."

"What possible connection could you have to Monsieur Leblanc?"

With manifest regret, she sets down the cat, and in that moment, I have-for the first time-the full dint of her attention. I fairly blanch before it. The smile alone, whetted against a million drawing rooms and antechambers.

"Doctor, I find myself longing uncharacteristically for exercise. Would you do me the honor of escorting me?"

Th e fog has begun to lift from the Luxembourg Gardens, but everything above our heads is still shrouded. The statuary. The fountains. The palace itself, where the Chamber of Peers-dried-up remnants of old monarchies and empires-make the rattling sounds of coffined men. Even the canopies of the plane trees have been sheared away, leaving only the trunks, damp and scarred, lining our path like battle trophies.

For someone who takes little exercise, the Baroness has a rapid step. I have to quicken my own to keep pace with her. Before long, though, our feet are moving together in a companionable rhythm-I could almost believe we've been meeting like this for generations, wearing out a trough in the gravel.

"You're still a young man," she says at last. "Twenty-five, perhaps?"

"Twenty-six."

She nods, abstractedly.

"It was nearly that many years ago I met Chretien Leblanc. A summer afternoon in the Stare Miosto in Warsaw. I was dining out of doors-a bowl of krupnik, I remember-and I looked up, and there he was, in his blue stockings and this rather faded frock coat. He was watching my soup, the way a cat watches a rabbit. In spite of myself, I was touched."

Her gloved hand exerts a barely perceptible pressure on my left arm.

"Leblanc was an emigre, too, in his own way. Lacking the curse of a title, he had weathered it out longer than most of us, but he, too, was obliged to leave Paris before long. In a hurry. He was wearing that look we all had at first, as though someone had dragged us into one of Montgolfier's balloons and tumbled us out before we'd quite landed. He was still finding his balance when I met him." She steps carefully round a puddle. "We fell into conversation. I liked his manners, and by the time he had finished my krupnik for me, I had formally engaged him."

Even through the fog, I can see where we are walking: along the parapet of the Pepiniere, near the Rue de l'Ouest. I can hear the uproar of sparrows and woodpeckers and linnets.

"My husband left behind a great financial ruin," says the Baroness. "I was correspondingly obliged to dismiss our servants. Leblanc was good enough to stay on for some time, and when he could no longer afford to, he continued to visit me at regular intervals, simply to see how I was faring. I rather think he kept me alive."

A tiny grunt as she slackens her pace.

"It was Leblanc who persuaded me to come back to Paris with the Bourbons. 'Bonaparte is gone,' he assured me. 'You may be happy once more.' He overestimated me, I'm afraid. But I did consent, if only to please him. My one condition was that he find me a place as far as possible from my old life."

With a gesture as eloquently foreshortened as any by Mademoiselle Mars, she sketches her present environs.