“Does he die?” I asked.
“It’s possible, Delphine. I’m just not sure. Let’s look again in a few months. The lines change. Did you know that? Destiny is not fixed. It’s a probable path, but life alters it. Otherwise, how boring life would be, non?”
All that fall and winter, I attended gatherings at the Librairie du Merveilleux and met many fascinating people, some of whom were working on the most arcane projects.
Pierre Dujols was writing and publishing several books. Two of his protégés, Eugène Canseliet and the much older illustrator Jean-Julien Champagne, were often found at a table poring over the rare manuscripts that filled the shop’s shelves. There was talk that the two of them were working on a groundbreaking book, Le mystère des cathédrales. Their thesis suggested that alchemical secrets were encoded in the stone carvings and structures of Gothic cathedrals.
By May 1920, Paris was awash with flowers and leaves bursting forth on all the trees. Often after school, I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens to find scenes to sketch, honing my skill at capturing a scene quickly.
On May 16, in the late afternoon, I was walking around the pond, attracted by the young children with their toy sailboats.
The sun was in my eyes, and there was a curious shimmering around the white sails, making each of them look like a passage to dreams.
I’d just taken out my journal, turquoise leather with unlined sheets, and was sketching when I saw Mathieu Roubine, a man I recognized from the bookshop. He was Pierre Dujols’s nephew, and he was helping a little boy who was fretting over a sail that wouldn’t unfurl.
I watched with curiosity. I’d never been introduced to Mathieu, but from the first time I’d seen him, he’d looked oddly familiar. His interactions with the child made a charming tableau, but I didn’t start sketching them because I was a sentimentalist. I was there to practice, and the composition of the tall man and the small boy had a symmetry to it that made a good design.
I’d thought it would be challenging to capture the sweetness and the details. To get the right expression of worry on the boy’s face, the concentration on Mathieu’s, and the movement of their hands and bodies bent toward each other.
Mathieu’s reflection swam on the surface of the pond. The simulacrum seemed ripped. Light was pouring out through the center of Mathieu’s back, as if he were made of paper and had been torn in half.
Mesmerized, I continued watching the watery image as a shadow crept up behind him. A man with the face of an insect—a metallic head, ovoid dark eyes, a hose where his nose and mouth should have been. Only when I saw the bayonet he held, pointed at Mathieu, did I realize the man was wearing a gas mask.
“Mathieu, watch out! On your right!” I shouted, as I ran toward him.
Startled, Mathieu looked up.
I continued running, prepared to—what? Push the attacker out of the way? I was hardly tall enough or strong enough to have done much good. But I wasn’t thinking. I just knew he was in danger. Terrible danger.
I was in such a hurry that I didn’t see the young girl on the bicycle. Afterward, between her sobs, she claimed I had run in front of her. Her wheel hit my right leg. I fell forward toward the pavement.
Mathieu was by my side in seconds. “Are you all right?”
Ignoring the throbbing pain in my leg, I looked around behind him for the assassin. No one was even close except the child. Where had the attacker run? Impossibly, he’d been there one moment and was gone the next.
“Are you all right?” Mathieu asked again.
The boy was watching us, seemingly delighted by all the excitement.
“Me? No. Yes. It doesn’t matter. There was a man . . .” I turned and looked around again in confusion. “There was a man behind you.”
“There was no one here.”
“Yes, he was right behind you. Wearing a helmet—it was gleaming in the sun.”
“A soldier?” the boy asked, even more excited. “With a helmet? Like a Hun?”
Mathieu’s gaze shifted away from me, off to the distance. “But that’s impossible.” He reached up and brushed his golden hair off his forehead. His gaze returned to me as he peered into my eyes. “Who are you? How do you know what happened to me? How do you know my name?”
“I don’t know what you mean about what happened to you, but I know who you are from the bookshop. I’m there quite often.”
Mathieu cocked his head. “I haven’t seen you.” He seemed bothered. Then he looked over at the boy, at his boat, and back at me. “Can you wait a moment? I have things I need to ask you, but I was just in the midst of salvaging my nephew Charles’s sailboat.”
I nodded and prepared to stand, but I was a bit wobbly.
“Let me help you up.”
He held out his hand, and I took it. His fingers were rough. His grip strong. Almost too strong. Once he’d pulled me up, I tested standing on my leg. There was only a little pain. I reached down and touched it. My stocking had ripped, but there was no blood. By that night, though, I’d probably be black and blue.
“You’ll wait?” he asked again, anxiously.
“Of course,” I said. “I need to get my supplies and my notebook anyway.”
I walked back to the bench where I had been sitting, barely limping. My pencils and case were there but not the journal. Then I remembered. I’d been holding it. When the girl on the bicycle hit me, had my notebook gone flying?
I searched around but didn’t see it anywhere. There was only one other possibility. I walked up to the edge of the pond. There was my lovely turquoise sketchbook, lying on the bottom of the shallow concrete pool.
“You dropped it because of me.” Mathieu had come up beside me.
“No, because the cyclist hit me.”
“But she hit you because you were running to me. Let me get it for you.” He rolled up his sleeve and reached down into the water.
I was glad his back was to me, because I was sure I winced. His arm was a mass of ugly scar tissue, ropes of twisted, bubbled, white skin, stretched tight and shiny. I didn’t have to ask. We’d all seen far too many war wounds. But compared with most, he was one of the lucky ones. He still had that arm, and from watching him fish my journal out of the pond, I could see that it functioned properly.
I tried to look away before he turned back, but he caught me staring. He handed me the journal. His fingers, I noticed, were unharmed and unscarred.
“I’m afraid it’s ruined,” he said, as he rolled his sleeve back down. For a moment, I thought he was talking about his injury, but then he continued. “And it looks like it was once quite a lovely sketchbook.”
I didn’t know what to do with the waterlogged and swollen mess dripping onto my shoes, so I put it down on one of the green metal chairs that ringed the pond.
“Will you allow me to buy you a café crème or a glass of wine?” he asked.
“So you can ask me questions, you mean, about what I saw?”