To our right, l’Hôtel de Ville and the Marais, and further yet, and not unknown to us both, Montmartre. Just ahead, l’ancienne cité, the original city, the medieval city from which the university and the city flowed.

And all around us, life — abundant, exuberant, elegant, bawdy, dizzying life!

Who would think to leave such a place, such a world, such a universe?

We would. We did.

He turned and began to walk away, the ragged palm leaves scraping up against the white stone of the balustrade, the leaves quivering and crackling as he swung his dead palm trunk-leg in a semi-circle around his good leg.

How different he and the saint, yet how much the same. She, a mortifier of the flesh… he, a glorious mortifier of another sort, a glutton for chemicals, shot by his lover, friendless, all but frozen to death in the Alps, half-drowned off Cyprus, slave trader, gunrunner, and finally, perhaps, an ascetic…

There was so much I wanted to ask him, but I let him limp away, and when he passed opposite the sterile, cold lines of the statue of Sainte Geneviève, patron saint of Paris, with its twin, anachronistic flying buttresses, I began to follow.

How different he and the saint, yet how much the same. She, a mortifier of the flesh, starving herself, nearly drowned by her enemies, friend to the abject and forgotten; he, a glorious mortifier of another sort, a glutton for chemicals, shot by his lover, friendless, all but frozen to death in the Alps, half-drowned off Cyprus, slave trader, gunrunner, and finally, perhaps, an ascetic; the pair of them, freaks for extremes, for horizons of pain, pleasure, deprivation — and both, need we say, keenly interested (albeit for different reasons) in virgins.

I stayed half a block behind him as he staggered painfully, slowly, along Quai Saint-Bernard, no one taking any more notice of him than they would any other seeming beggar-apparition, no one stepping out of his way but forcing him to step, as best he could, out of theirs to avoid a painful, crippling collision. When he reached Jardin des Plantes, he wearily slumped onto a bench, the occupants shooting him a miserable look before rising and finding another place to sit unmolested by a threadbare, possibly vile-smelling and nacreous, dying man.

Such, I suppose, is our common humanity.

I stood by a hedge, anxious lest he should crumple to the ground and not rise again.

I could only imagine how raw and bloody the stump where it met the no doubt haphazardly cut and ill-fitting palm trunk.

But he did not die, not then, not at this moment in the city of his ruin and apotheosis, and he gripped the bench-back with his immense, pinkish left hand and pushed himself to his feet.

Staggering once more along the river as it swings gently to the south and east, he carried on past the edge of the gardens, passing Pont d’Austerlitz and quick-walking as best he could across Boulevard de l’Hôpital to the sidewalks in front of Gare d’Austerlitz where, despite his evident trauma and creeping death, he lingered — loitered — conspicuously. Sure enough, within half an hour, two train gendarmes had grabbed him for loitering and shoved him into the back of a wagon for the journey to police headquarters. If he could survive the complementary beating — no doubt they would size-up his condition and rough him up with just a few cuffs and kicks — he would be turned out to the prison yard, and there await transportation to Mazas.