From the Madeleine to the Bastille we stroll, Charles and I, past a million coffeehouses, past baths, restaurants and patisseries, past theaters and billiard rooms, keeping a steady pulse against all those counterpulses, stopping only to refresh ourselves or duck out of a passing shower.

And if, now and then, a familiar f lash of scarlet registers on the edge of my retina, I just take Charles by the arm and disappear into a crowd of vendors.

Apples, monsieur! . . . Ah, messieurs, buy my potatoes! . . . Old clothes! . . . Rabbit skins! . . . Petits pains au lait! Hot! Hot!

One afternoon, we are stopped on the Boulevard de la Madeleine by a cortege of great solemnity. The street itself falls silent before the spectacle. Seven wagons. And in each wagon, twentyfour men, sitting back-to-back, their feet in wooden shoes, their necks secured by iron collars, their arms bound, like vertebrae, by a single chain.

As they pass, we hear a gourdlike rattle and the crack of lashes, and the men themselves, shivering in the sun, give off a hum like plainchant, in which you can hear fragments of obscene tavern songs.

"Who are they?" Charles whispers.

"Convicts."

"Where are they going?"

"To the galleys."

The lucky ones, I might add. The others . . .

Well, one need only scan the men lying in that final wagon: baled like hay, glossy with fever. They won't last another day. More than half their company will die, too, before the journey is done; those that survive will wish they hadn't. Chained at the ankles from dawn to dusk . . . set to toil in pestilential heat . . . f logged, spat upon, beaten, sodomized. And their reward at the end of the day? A wooden plank to set their shaved heads on-and the ever-receding prospect of freedom.

"Hector! "

Charles' nostrils recoil, as if an invisible hand were pressing against them.

"That smell," he says. "It's just like your friend."

And he's right.

Amazing to think a smell could adhere to a man fifteen years after he left the galleys. My gaze, untethered, wanders from wagon to wagon until it lights on a haggard, toothless, string-thin fellow, bobbing in and out of sleep-and at last giving way altogether so that, in the very next second, he's tumbling straight out of the wagon and taking with him the rest of his comrades in chains. One by one, they topple onto the cobbles, like sparrows falling from chimneys.

At once, the marshals and guards spring on them with cudgels and horsewhips and the f lats of swords. With great effort, the bound convicts stagger to their feet and totter back to the wagon-shuff ling as they go, for though their ankles have been left free for the journey, the sheer memory of those shackles causes each man to drag his right foot after him.

Just like Vidocq, I think, dazzled.

And now, by common impulse, Charles and I take f light. We leave the convicts, we leave the boulevards, and we dash away, in no particular direction, simply following the city's own declivity. Around us, the air begins to seethe and crackle, but we keep walking, and it's the river that stops us finally.

We look round in a stupor and find ourselves under a dark mass of chestnuts, peering down a long promenade.

The Tuileries gardens.

A hard northwest wind is thrashing the orange trees, bending back the topiary globes, scooping the water straight from the fountains. To the south, the Seine is churning like surf, and to the east, candles are winking on at every window, as the palace bundles down for the coming blow.

All the promenaders have long since left-their rented chairs lie tipped over, their abandoned newspapers kick up like sails-but Charles refuses to move. And as the first heavy drops of rain strike his bare head, he blinks twice and says:

"Wait."

He walks, very slowly, toward a lilac bush.

He kneels down. He fumbles through the bush's lower branches, gropes all the way to the root. Then, after several seconds of concentrated effort, he draws out his trophy. Holds it out to me in his palm.

A ribbon. Of Bourbon white.

Dirty and torn and half-unraveled-and still luminous, as though the rain were washing away the years. And washing Charles into- someone else. Someone I've never met before.

I kneel alongside him. I talk straight into his ear.

"Did you know this ribbon was there?"

After several seconds, he nods, very slowly.

"Did you put it there yourself?"

Another pause. Another nod.

"Did it happen a long time ago?"

Only a foot separates us, but I have to raise my voice, simply to be heard above the wind and rain.