"By all means," mumbles Charles, half rising from his seat and then crashing back down.

My appointed companion is perhaps twenty-two, with rough freckled hands and brown eyes shining over a thin, pickled mouth.

"Virginie," she tells me.

"I was just going to guess that."

The woman who claims Charles is named Berthe. She has a granite head and an air of interrupted industry, as though she's left a pile of dirty laundry in the coffee room.

"No thanks," she says, pushing away her glass. "Champagne makes me burp."

If a human being has ever said anything funnier than that . . . well, Charles has yet to hear it.

"Burp," he gasps. "Burp."

Virginie's fingers scuttle up my arm.

"My, aren't you handsome?"

"Ladies," I say, rising unsteadily to my feet. "Shall we scatter?"

I fully expect us to head upstairs to one of the houses of tolerance, but Virginie takes us straight down to the garden and out the gate.

"Aren't we . . . ?"

"Bit of a problem with our licenses," she answers. "Never mind, we've got lovely rooms not four blocks off."

To my right, I see Charles listing east to west, with only Berthe's stout arm to keep him vertical. By the time we reach the corner of the Rue Droit-Mur, he is leaning almost all of his weight into her, and a song is pouring out of his throat, high and raucous:

"There's a cherie I know And her boat I shall row Frontward, backward Any way she' ll go-"

"No more," I whisper in his ear.

"And it's in . . . out . . . Lord, how she shouts! In . . . out . . ."

"Shut up! " hisses Berthe. "You'll get the gendarmes on our tail! " "You remind me of a goat I used to have," he says.

"Thanks very much, I'm sure."

"Do you have playing cards where you live?"

"I should think so," she answers vaguely.

"Ninepins?"

"Oh, ninepins."

We turn down the Petite Rue Picpus and come to a crackled white

plaster housefront, wreathed in ivy, with a single night lamp burning in the window.

"Just three f loors to climb," says Virginie.

With Charles lurching and stumbling, it seems to take nearly half a day. As soon as he's shown his room, he falls onto the cot bedstead with the weight of a hundred men and goes directly to sleep.

"Not much of a drinker, is he?" says Berthe.

Shrugging, she draws over a chair to the room's single candle and takes up a square of embroidery, blue and puckered.

"Look here," I say. "He'll be all right, won't he?"

"What, you think I'm going to wake him? This is the first break I've had all day."

"But he doesn't like being left alone. He likes having company when he sleeps."

"Dearie, he's fine," murmurs Virginie, tugging on my arm.

Vi d o c q onc e theo rized that I hadn't been fucked since Waterloo. In fact, I've had enough recent experience with prostitutes to recognize the advantages of Virginie. She has, to begin with, teeth. Her face doesn't resolve into harsh grooves the moment you touch her. Through it all, she retains the same air of benign encouragement she had when she sat down at our cafe table.

One thing I have forgotten: how stirring a woman's humidity can be. A whole continent waiting to be claimed, yes, and I can only be grateful that my little explorer shakes off the slumber that has seized the rest of me. In the exhaustion that follows there's a seam of satisfaction, as if I've been clearing away brush.