"What's it supposed to be? Ambassador?"

"Emeritus, you might say."

"Come with accessories?"

"Wigs, very recently deloused. Green spectacles, with optional silk shades. Watch fobs, plus trinkets for hanging from same." His lips melt slowly away from his gums. "You can keep the trinkets. My gift to you, Monsieur."

"Well, then," says Vidocq. "What are you waiting for, boys? Try 'em on, for Christ's sake."

"The usual weekly rate, Monsieur?"

"Put us down for two weeks. No more."

"Very good. And please to remember it's double the fee for every day they're late. And no eating of garlic. Gets in the fibers."

We test our new identities that very afternoon-on the wide sandy paths of the Luxembourg Gardens. My boots pinch much more than they did in the shop, and my wig is home to something small and mobile and latently hostile, and every worn seam, every dangling thread seems to cry: "Impostor! "

But then a pretty young girl walks past us, her smile spilling over us like water. A slumbering Scotch terrier snores itself awake. One of the swans scrapes its rump on the stone. Vidocq guessed right. Ridiculous as Charles and I look, we've been absorbed, with no discernible struggle, into the warp and weave of Paris. (Where everyone is an impostor.)

"Hector! "

With a trembling voice, Charles takes me by the arm.

"What is it?"

"The chestnuts," he whispers, pointing to a long branch with gaudy white feather-blossoms. "You were right. They're in bloom."

It's what he's been waiting for all along. The thing he was promised back in Saint-Cloud.

And now it seems perfectly natural to demand something in return. To look into those pacific blue eyes and say . . .

"Tell me about your parents."

He doesn't actively resist my queries, he simply huddles round them. When that fails, he bounces them back. We spend far more time talking about my parents than his, and whenever I try to return the conversation back to him, his eyes skim over, as though he were trying to remember an old poem. All he can say definitively is that his parents died.

"When I was very young," he adds.

"Do you remember anything about them?"

"They loved me."

"Did they leave you anything to live on?"

"I suppose they must have. I've always had people taking care of me."

"Like Monsieur Tepac."

"Yes."

"Was there someone before him?"

"Ohhh . . ."

A yawn palsies his jaw, sets his wig to jiggling.

"What's that?" he asks, pointing.

"The Luxembourg Palace."

"Where the king lives?"

"No, the Chamber of Peers sits there."

"And who are they?"

Old men. Chateaubriand's words rise to mind: The dried-up debris of the Old Monarchy, the Revolution, and the Empire. . . .