CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

On the Stairs, 9

Draft inventory of some of the things found on the stairs over the years

SEVERAL PHOTOS, including one of a fifteen-year-old girl wearing a black swimsuit bottom and a white knitwear sweater, kneeling on a beach,

                   a radio alarm clock obviously destined for the mender’s, in a plastic bag from the Nicolas company,

                   a black shoe decorated with jewels,

                   a slipper made of gilded goatskin,

                   a box of Géraudel cough pastilles,

                   a muzzle,

                   a Russian-leather cigarette case,

                   straps,

                   various notebooks and appointment books,

                   a cubic lampshade in bronze-coloured metallic paper, in a bag originating in a record shop in Rue Jacob,

                   a milk bottle in a bag from Bernard the butcher’s,

                   a romantic engraving depicting Rastignac at the Père-Lachaise cemetery, in a bag from Weston’s shoeshop,

                   a (humorous?) printed card announcing the engagement of Eleuthère de Grandair and the Marquis of Grandpré,

                   a rectangular, 21cm × 27cm sheet of paper on which the genealogical tree of the Romanov family had been carefully drawn and framed with a frieze of broken lines,

                   Pride and Prejudice, a novel by Jane Austen, in the Tauchnitz edition, opened at page 86,

                   a cardboard box from the pastry shop Aux Délices de Louis XV, now empty but having manifestly once contained blueberry tarts,

                   a copy of Bouvard and Ratinet’s logarithmic tables, in poor condition, with the stamp: Lycée de Toulouse, and a name: P. Roucher, written in red ink, on the flyleaf,

                   a kitchen knife,

                   a little metal mouse, with a shoelace for a tail, on wheels, that could be wound up with a flat key,

                   a bobbin of sky-blue thread,

                   a novelty necklace,

                   a crumpled copy of Jazz Review containing an interview by Hubert Damisch with Jay Jay Johnson, the trombone-player, and an article by the drummer Al Levitt about his first stay in Paris in the midfifties,

                   a travelling chess set, in synthetic leather, with magnetic pieces,

                   a pair of tights, brand name “Mitoufle”,

                   a carnival mask representing Mickey Mouse,

                   several paper flowers, paper hats, and some confetti,

                   a sheet of paper covered in childish drawings, in the gaps of which a laborious first draft of a second year Latin prose composition is fitted: dicitur formicas offeri granas fromenti in buca Midæ pueri in somno eius. Deinde suus pater arandum, aquila se posuit in iugum et araculum oraculus nuntiavit Midam futurus esse rex. Quidam scit Midam electum esse regum Phrygiæ et [illegible word] latum reges suis leonis.