Sighing, she shuts the notebook, looks up at the window.

That’s it, the first part of the story, her meeting with Gilbert, is finished. Everything has been put in place – location, characters, action, soon she’ll start to develop it and take it not to its conclusion, because nothing is completely finished yet, but to the delicate situation she’s in at the moment, the choice between two poles, each as unappealing as the other: to drag out an affair that would never stop providing highs and lows – the highs sometimes thrilling enough to be dangerous, the lows too intense to be bearable – or to put an end to it once and for all, regain the dismal peace of mind she’d had a scant few months earlier and drown in it forever. On one side, passion, on the other, peace. Either one impossible to live with.

Meanwhile, starting tomorrow, she’ll have to write the story of Madame Veuve. It will take her away from her story, she knows that, but she could use a break, a diversion, before tackling the main part of what she has to say.

It’s one of those sticky nights that she loves. She thinks about her bed, about the coolness of the sheets, which won’t last long, about the hours she’ll spend preparing the important piece, half-fiction, half-reality, that she’s getting ready to start the next day. The background of Gilbert Forget. His crazy mother. His incredible childhood. His hell and artificial paradises. His first salvation, the guitar. His second salvation, her – or so he claims when he spends hours on the phone crying and pleading with her not to abandon him.

She yawns, sighs, cracks her knuckles.

A small piece of moon is reflected in a window on the top floor of a building across the street on Place Jacques-Cartier. She gets up to take a better look.

Céline switches off the lamp, a fake Tiffany she bought for the huge sum of ten dollars from an antiques dealer on Notre-Dame Street and turns towards her bed.

“À nous deux, Madame Veuve!”