From the street below, a gendarme regards me fixedly.

"Just going for a walk," I explain.

"Then you must bring me along. Chief 's orders."

It's not, after all, a very long stroll to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve. The smoke can still be smelled from a block away, and in the early-morning light, Maison Carpentier has the look of someone in a tavern brawl. Black-eyed windows, missing door-teeth . . . cauterized innards and shreds of curtain dangling like torn-off hair. Through the holes in the roof a half-dozen rooks wheel and dive. Colonizing the only home I've ever known.

"Hector! "

Father Time is coming down the hill toward me, wearing the same shabby clothes he took with him out of this house. In the light of dawn, he has the look of someone roused from the dead.

"So glad I could-oh, I say," he exclaims to the gendarme blocking his path. "Is this a friend of yours, Hector?"

"It's all right! " I call. "Professor Corneille comes in peace."

The gendarme grudgingly steps aside. Clutching his coat, Father Time minces toward me, a smile teasing his gray lips apart.

"Thousand apologies for missing the funeral, my boy. Such a-such a dreadful business. I always assumed your parents would be burying me, you know, not the other way. . . ."

He's stopped by the sight of that building, hollow and savage.

"So . . . so very . . ."

And for several minutes, we say nothing at all. We watch the rooks, we smell the fumes. And then, in a low and elegiac voice, Father Time says:

"How I wish you could have known your mother, my boy. When she was young, I mean. What fire she had! Truly, a remarkable orator."

"Orator? "

"Oh, yes! She was a leading light in the-the Fraternal Society for Patriots of Both Sexes. I remember the first time I heard her speak. 'Toward the Next Enlightenment,' that was her theme. Men and women, side by side, striding toward paradise. Rip-roaring stuff. I was ready to throw out civilization and start from scratch."

"But why didn't she . . ."

"Oh, well, you came along, didn't you? Wouldn't do to drag babies to midnight meetings, like some fishwife. No, in the end, she was the good bourgeoise. Stayed home with her baby."

And became . . . how did my mother put it? One of those helpless, sad women. Whose final act was to reclaim her dowry. The chest of silver that even now lies buried with her.

"Are you all right, my boy?"

I don't answer at first. I just keep rubbing my face until the only thing I can feel is the friction in my skin.

"I'm fine," I say at last. "But what about you, Monsieur? Where will you go?"

"Oh, as to that." A f lush of purple in his slackened cheeks. "You know the expression, desperate times call for-what I mean to say is I've contacted an old friend of mine-owns a charming cottage in Vernon and-well, not to put too fine a point on it, I've asked for her hand in marriage."

"And she-consented?"

"Oh, my, yes. She's been after me for years, you know. But I would insist on my bachelor ways."

His chuckle seems to separate his jaw from the rest of his skull.

"Ah, well, it can't be helped," he says. "No more orchid volumes to sell."

He stares down at his miserable boots, with their lacquer of egg yolk, and I feel a sharp pang thinking of what he lost to the fire. That barrelful of Revolutionary artifacts. Tricolor snuff boxes and Rousseau's mitten. Reams and reams of old . . .

Old journals . . .

"You're Junius," I say.

I voice it in the very moment I think it. And the sound of that name jars open Father Time's mouth, sends his hand beetling across his chest.

"Well, yes. In another life, that was-"

"Your pseudonym. When you wrote for the Courrier Universel. You're the one who told them about the dauphin's condition." I pause to let the words seep back in. "Junius will know what to do. That's what Father wrote in his journal. Just days before Louis the Seventeenth died. He was going to speak with you."