I’d just as soon take a walk down the Champs-Élysées some spring evening. They don’t really exist anymore, but, at night, they still maintain the illusion. Perhaps along the Champs-Élysées I might hear your voice call to me by name. The day you sold the fur coat and the cabochon emerald, I still had about two thousand francs left from the money I had received from Béraud-Bedoin. We were rich. The future was ours. That evening, you were kind enough to come and join me up by Étoile. It was summertime, the same summer we met on the quays, you and me and Crossbones, the afternoon I saw the two of you walking towards me. We went to the restaurant on the corner of rue François-1er and rue Marbeuf. They had put tables out on the sidewalk. It was still daytime. The traffic had thinned and we could hear the murmur of voices and the sound of footsteps. Around ten o’clock, as we made our way down the Champs-Élysées, I asked myself if night would ever fall, if we might be experiencing the midnight sun they get in Russia and the northernmost countries. We walked without any specific destination, we had the whole night ahead of us. There were still patches of sunlight under the arches of rue de Rivoli. It was the beginning of summer, we were going to be leaving soon. Where to? We didn’t know yet. Maybe Majorca or Mexico. Maybe London or Rome. The places no longer mattered in the least, they had all blended together into one. The lone goal of our journey was to go to the heart of summer, that place where time stops and the hands of the clock permanently show the same hour: twelve noon.