before she puts her fingers to my lips and commands my silence. Her skin is soft, surprisingly soft.
Then she steps away from me, still without uttering a word. As she moves towards the corridor, she repeatedly points to the objects on the floor. The sheet of paper and the pencil.
Before disappearing, she smiles at me as if to console me, encouraging me to be patient, telling me that she will come back. I follow her with my eyes until she’s gone. Then the noise of the door closing wakes me up.
NOTES UPON WAKING
1. As I recall, the sheet of paper and the pencil were on the table last night. But memories can be deceptive; this one must be deceptive. Without realising it, I put them at the end of the bed before going to sleep.
2. The sexual charge of the dream is undeniable and is not unknown in the malaise afflicting me. But why did the young woman insist that I record the contents of the dream on paper?
3. (Note added at 8.15 a.m.) Took a long time to fall asleep again. When I got up, I checked that the bedroom door was locked. It was.
In the morning, I bought a notebook at a shop on Rue Saint-Honoré and then sat outside a café where I wrote up the dream properly, having scribbled it down at three o’clock in the morning almost automatically, together with the observations I had forced myself to record with as much clarity as I could at the time.
This I christened my dream notebook. It would come to play an important role throughout my life.
Clearly, dreams were to be significant during my time in Paris. Having come to find out the real cause of the death of Gérard de Nerval, for whom dreams and reality had constantly merged recklessly, I myself was now experiencing the ambiguous nature of the realm of dreams, at once so alluring and so pernicious.
Just for a moment, feeling suddenly fearful, I almost turned back and took the first train to London. But, as I was leaving the café, somewhere a bell chimed eleven o’clock and I instinctively hurried in the direction of the Seine, cut through the Tuileries Gardens and, crossing Pont du Carrousel, reached the Gare d’Orsay where Fourier and his constable, Dupuytren, were waiting for me on the platform for the express train to Orléans.
Notes
7 The Stavisky affair, which had come to light in December 1933, was still on everyone’s minds. Denounced by the press, the scandal of false credit bonds at Crédit Municipal in Bayonne had led to the fall of the Chautemps government. The investigation had revealed numerous fraudulent relationships between the police, the justice system and politicians. (Publisher’s note)
8 On 9 October, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Louis Barthou, was killed in an attack committed by a Croatian nationalist organisation, along with King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, whom he had gone to welcome at the port of Marseille. There was an immediate debate about failings in the police protection provided for such a high-risk visit. (Publisher’s note)
When we came out of Étampes station, the driver of an old-fashioned four-cylinder Colda called over to us.
‘Superintendent Fourier?’
‘That’s me!’
‘I am Monsieur Breteuil’s chauffeur – he’s the examining magistrate. He sent me. He’s waiting for you at the château.’
‘How considerate!’
We drove for about three miles before reaching the entrance to the estate. Two sergeants were on duty, keeping an eye on the reporters and the curious who were crowding around the gates. Ever since the publication of the much-read article in Paris-Soir all comings and goings had been carefully checked in order to try to gather any snippets of information.
The gates were opened to let us through and the car sped up the drive leading to the château.
It was a charming manor house, a relic from a rich past – one of those houses that make the Île-de-France region so appealing today. The façade was fairly wide and two storeys high. Behind the imposing main body of the building were the narrow roofs of two medieval towers which could be seen from the direction of the village.
In fact, the château hadn’t been built in the Middle Ages, but at the end of the sixteenth century and altered several times during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One restoration project had left more of a mark than the others – there were signs that the front of the building had been added to an older section at the back or had at least been rebuilt from top to bottom along more modern lines.
As Superintendent Fourier had had time to explain to me on the journey, the Marquis de Brindillac had bought Château B— twenty years earlier to escape the hustle and bustle of the capital which had become unsuitable for the work he was carrying out.
Auguste Jean Raoul de Brindillac had been born on 28 April 1862. His father, Ernest Léon Honoré, had been an army surgeon, who in 1859 had married Marquise Joséphine Amélie de la Batte, granddaughter of a general during the Empire. They had had three children: Honoré, Auguste and Joséphine. After the death of his first wife, Auguste de Brindillac had in 1899 married Sophie Mathilde Van Doorsen, heiress of a wealthy Dutch family originally from Haarlem, with whom he had had two children: René, who had died in a hunting accident in 1926, and Amélie.
The Marquis de Brindillac, like his father before him, developed a vocation for surgery and anatomy very early on. He qualified as a doctor at the École de Médecine de Paris. An admirer of Bouillaud, and particularly Broca, he was passionate about physiology and the study of the human brain. He spent time at the laboratories of Marey, Berthelot and Vulpian. Following in the footsteps of Paul Broca, he focused his early scientific research on a better understanding of the limbic system or rhinencephalon, and on identifying the centre of speech in the brain. In 1894 he wrote a Clinical and Physiological Treatise on the Location of the Language Centre in the Brain which is still a standard work on the subject and led to him being elected to the Académie de Médecine de Paris in 1896. He was a professor of clinical medicine and physiology at the Hôpital de la Charité for a long time. The publication of his Clinical Treatise on Disorders of the Nervous System in 1909 definitively established his reputation as a leading scientist. In 1911 he was appointed dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. In November 1924, he was elected to the Académie des Sciences. The Marquis was without doubt one of the country’s greatest minds.
The chauffeur parked on the drive, near the main entrance to the château, next to two saloon cars in the deep-blue colour of the French gendarmerie.
As we climbed the front steps, a short man of about sixty, whose hair and small goatee were as white as his skin, came to greet us. He was accompanied by a man who looked almost identical – same build, same pointed beard – but with slightly blonder hair, and twenty years younger. Behind him, a bald, plump individual was talking to a gendarme in the entrance hall.
‘Superintendent Fourier I presume?’ said the pale man. ‘I’m Judge Breteuil and I’ve been appointed by the Versailles prosecutor’s studyto handle this sad affair. Let me introduce Monsieur Bezaine, my clerk. Oh, and this is Monsieur d’Arnouville, the prosecutor’s deputy, who was just leaving, and Second Lieutenant Rouzé, from the local gendarmerie.’
He indicated the two men from the hall who, having seen us, had come out on to the steps to join us.
‘Monsieur, let me thank you for sending