Last had begun to put his final hopes in Ariade, a woman whom he’d observed in the Luxembourg Gardens. Around one, most afternoons, she would sit at the same table tanning her legs, which she put up on the opposite chair. He would take the next table, where he usually read. Eventually he began to chat. She spoke indifferently, amused, her eyes closed, her face turned to the sun. If she were reading, she spoke without taking her eyes off her book. She would have been aware of a man who looked a little dishevelled, anonymous, a life in transit. He was careful to leave long silences so she could read.

Occasionally Last arrived when it was cloudy and she was not there. It was clear that she came only for the sun, not for him. Still, Last came to hope for sunny days. As a rule, he disliked sunny days which had always meant the workaday world and its expectations. Last preferred a lowering sky, or fog; a sense of things not being normal, of something impending.

When it was sunny, in the Luxembourg, Ariade finally began to ask him the odd question about himself. Then she would smoke a cigarette in silence. Then he would ask her a question. She was finishing her doctoral thesis on Syrian predecessors to the Bogomils and worked the early morning shift at a nearby all-night pharmacy. She was dark and slender, elegant. She wore light loose shifts and minimal sandals. On a crowded Sunday, when she allowed someone to take the opposite chair, she raised her legs and crossed her feet on Last’s knee.

That night, Last looked into the mirror and wondered if it was possible any longer to love someone like himself. At forty-nine he still had brownish hair, which, like the eyes behind the silver-rimmed glasses, was colourless. His hair was a thatch and he was thin. He looked winded, as if he’d been chased through a hailstorm; at least he had the patina of someone who had lived. If unsuccessful, he was intelligent. If facing eventual poverty, he dressed well. The less money he had, the more possessions he gave up, the more often he had his clothes dry cleaned and polished his shoes. He was always clean.

The following morning, as Last went out past the hotel reception, the manager announced loudly that he had no mail. Last had never had any mail since he’d been in France. Still, the manager, whose name was Henri, seemed to take pleasure in announcing it. Last even wondered if he knew about Ariade and the sunny days, since Henri had expatiated with cheerful condescension about a band of bad weather that approached France from Les Hébrides. Last had once liked Henri, who used the philosophy from his doctorate at the Sorbonne as a pursuit, not a career. Last had respected this; it addressed his own problem of getting through the day, which had become his chief problem.

He lived in a sort of mindless desperation. Continually, he had to leave wherever he was for somewhere else. He left the silence of his hotel every morning for the noise of a café, abandoned the anomie of the café for another café; that café for the brightness of the Luxembourg Gardens; the ruthlessness in the high afternoon sun in the Luxembourg for the cool solitude of the hotel room. The terrible late afternoon light in his room for the early dusk in the street. Wakefulness for sleep; the torments of sleep for the dreamless anxiety of wakefulness. In the evenings he smoked his single cigarette and drank, sometimes until he was drunk. And so on. He sought a calm centre which he never found. He sought stasis, yet when he found it, discovered that death lurked there. This was partly why he had left Toronto; in Paris it pursued him block to block. The narcotic which sustained him was reading. But he couldn’t concentrate.

Even the idea of sightseeing filled him with boredom, sometimes rage. As he walked through the Septième the following morning for his usual coffee, he reflected that he had never visited its great time-eaten monuments: St. Sulpice, the Odeon, St. Germain des Prés, Les Invalides. On the contrary, as early as his youth, he had become a connoisseur of the ugly, the blighted, the meaningless, the chaotic and the transitory. Humanity décolleté. It was behind the high-rises and freeways, the bleak industrial zones of Casablanca and Toronto that the great tidal-flats of humanity and its history were exposed; in fragments of speech; in corruptions of names, in tribal peoples in apartment blocks; in adulterated vestiges of traditional cooking in fly-ridden restaurants. The final murmurs of individual humanity drowning in the very mass into which it was being transformed. Whereas if you went inside St. Sulpice, you would feel nothing. Once, after being stood up by a woman at a restaurant, he forced himself to go into the church of Les Invalides. Napoleon’s battle flags hung high along the apse in a vaporous, meaningless, necromancy.

Last arrived at the café Mariem. He was having his coffee and reading the Herald Tribune when he became aware of someone sitting next to him, making noise with a newspaper. It was an American, perhaps forty, over six feet with acne scarring and glasses who had taken the next table though the terrace was empty. He was dressed in khaki chinos, Hushpuppies and white socks. He drank his coffee loudly and kept shaking out his newspaper. Last was about to move away when the American suddenly laughed and pointed to an editorial.

"Californian wines are threatening French wine exports. Unbelievable."

"Why?" Last said.

"No, it’s all this stuff with France standing alone in their foreign policy on the war in Iraq. They’re threatened. I think they’re just playing the big différence card."

His name was Howard. He worked in the economics section at the American Embassy. Last asked what that meant. Howard said, "Beats me. A title looking for a job . . . You know, I deal US investment in France, French exports. I’m bored, frankly. If somebody said ‘Where’s your life going?’ I’d say I honestly don’t know."

Last sensed a rapport. They chatted about the French, about Americans and so on.

"What do you do?" Howard asked.

The question was bound to come, the answer many times rehearsed: "Taking time off," Last said. He added something vague about being an editor, conveyed a pensive existence. The truth was, he lived in a nightmare on dwindling savings brought from Canada.

"You sit in the cafés," Howard said. "That’s fantastic. All day in the cafés. Wow."

Howard got up to go, and turned: "You usually here round now?"

Last said that he usually was.

"I’ll probably see you. I’ve started running in the mornings. I pass by here."

Last liked Howard mostly because he was not at all like Last: Howard was friendly, up-front, open.

Last watched Howard cross the street and break into an athletic jog. He reflected that there were now two people he liked: Ariade and Howard. Though they didn’t know one another, Last paired them in his mind; they seemed to give a dimension to things that wasn’t there before. There was a sense of something happening.