Once outside again, my heart is pounding as if I have been going up and not down, and I feel relieved of some obscure oppression. The concierge’s unexpected intrusion gave me quite a start, and I am puzzled by the ruckus I heard upstairs, which I surmise she must have heard as well. Clearly it wasn’t her slippered feet I had heard clunking around on the top floor. Before going out the door to the street, I glance up at the windows, where not a gleam of light appears.
R
In my little black moleskin, Jules Renard headed my list of Paris contacts. He was a professor emeritus of the Sorbonne and had been mentoring my project on behalf of his former colleague, my thesis director back in the States. An expert on Montparnasse in the 1920s, he had furnished me with books, articles, bibliographies
