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and later I noticed that it was also the name of a friend of Alfred de Musset’s. And a man my father always called by his surname, Rosen (or Rozen). This Rosen (or Rozen) was the spitting image of the actor David Niven. I seem to recall that during the Spanish Civil War, he enlisted on the side of Franco. He could sit silently on the couch for hours. Even in my father’s absence. Even at night, I imagine. He was part of the furniture.
    Sometimes my father came with me on Monday mornings to the Rotonde at the Porte d’Orléans.That’s where I would catch the bus that took me back to school. We got up at six o’clock, and my father used the time before the bus arrived to hold appointments in the cafés around the Porte d’Orléans, lit with neon on those winter mornings when it was still pitch black outside. Hiss of the percolators. The people he saw there were different from the ones he met at the Claridge or the Grand Hôtel. They spoke in low voices. Stall hawkers, men with the ruddy complexion of traveling salesmen or the sly demeanor of provincial clerks. What did he want with them, exactly? They sported rural names like Quintard, Chevreau, Picard …
    One Sunday morning, we took a taxi to the Bastille neighborhood. My father had the driver stop about twenty times in front of apartment houses on Boulevard Voltaire, Avenue de la République, Boulevard Richard-Lenoir … Each time, he left an envelope with the concierge. A notice to former shareholders of a defunct company whose stock certificates he had unearthed? Something like the Union MinièreIndochinoise? On another Sunday, he dropped off his envelopes along Boulevard Pereire.
    Sometimes, on Saturday evenings, we went to visit an elderly couple, the Facons, who lived in a minuscule apartment on Rue du Ruisseau, behind Montmartre. On the wall of the tiny living room, exhibited in a frame, was the military medal M. Facon had been awarded in World War I. He was a former printer who loved literature. He gave me a handsomely bound edition of Saint-Pol Roux’s book of poems
La Rose et les épines du chemin.
Under what circumstances had my father met him?
    I also remember a certain Léon Grunwald. He came to lunch with my father several times a week. Tall, with wavy gray hair, face like a spaniel’s, drooping eyes and shoulders. Much later, I was surprised to find a trace of the man in Jesús Ynfante’s book on the “Broglie Affair”: In 1968, the president of a company called Matesa “was seeking financing to the tune of fifteen to twenty million dollars.” He had got in touch with Léon Grunwald, “who had helpedarrange the primary financing to Luxembourg.” A memorandum of understanding was signed by “Jean de Broglie, Raoul de Léon, and Léon Grunwald”; if the loan went through, they stood to earn a commission of five hundred thousand dollars. According to what I read, Grunwald had died in the interim. From exhaustion? It’s true that these kinds of people have demanding jobs and spend many a sleepless night. By day, they schedule countless meetings with one another to try to sign their “memoranda of understanding.”
    I would like to breathe purer air, my head is spinning, but still I recall several of my father’s “appointments.” One late morning I had accompanied him to the Champs-Elysées. We were welcomed by a short, bald, very vivacious man, in a cupboard-sized office where we could barely find room to sit. I thought he was one of the seven dwarves. He kept his voice down, as if he wasn’t supposed to be there.
    Normally, my father held his “appointments” in the lobby of the Claridge, where he took me on Sundays. One afternoon, I stayed to theside while he conferred in undertones with an Englishman. He tried to grab a sheet of paper the Englishman had just initialed, but the latter snatched it away too quickly. What