“But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.”

“I had walked over to the window and was looking down at the rails of the Montmartre funicular, the gardens of the Sacré Cœur and, further off, the whole of Paris, with its lights, its roofs, its shadows. Denise Coudreuse and I had met one day in this maze of roads and boulevards. Paths that cross, among those of thousands and thousands of people all over Paris, like countless little balls on a gigantic, electric billiard table, which occasionally bump into each other. And nothing remained of this, not even the luminous trail a firefly leaves behind it.”

“I noticed a phenomenon that doesn't often happen toa man: several women turned round as he passed them.”

“That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time-everything that defiles and destroys you-have been able to take away from her.”

“Something—he wondered later if it was simply his youth—something that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.”

“But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.”

“One should never expect anyone to reply to one's questions.”

“Yes, this man had the persistence of an insect.”

“When he was younger, he used the slightest opportunity to slip away from people, without his being able to understand very clearly why he did so: a longing to break free and to breathe in the fresh air?”

“Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don't even know.”

“No. She told me she was going to marry him, to get French nationality . . . She was obsessed with getting a nationality...”