Raymond and I celebrate our windfall with the latest Parisian rage. Hashish abounds these days, smuggled from the Suez through Djibouti to Marseilles and then into the ville lumière. Such is the trade that a man can make a small fortune if he can just secure the capital to enter the business. The valise, I assure Raymond, is our way out of other men’s pockets and into prosperity.

“Bah,” Legrand disagrees. “You’ll both be old men before you graduate from the Gare de Lyon.” He sells us a pipe’s worth of hash out of pity. He is our Fagin, our Valjean, a former sneak thief like us who graduated to the far more luxurious life of a dream merchant — not only hashish but cocaine, women, other pleasures. He is successful because he has an eye for the value of things. And he doesn’t believe anyone would trade a pencil to get back the papers contained in the suitcase we stole.

He is our Fagin, our Valjean, a former sneak thief like us who graduated to the far more luxurious life of a dream merchant… He is successful because he has an eye for the value of things.

“But you didn’t see the woman’s response,” I insist. “I went back to the platform to check her reaction. It was risky, but the only way of knowing whether our work was indeed for naught. It also cost me fifty centimes to get back through the turnstiles. Small cost, though. She was causing quite the scene. I could hear her wailing to the gendarmes and porters, half in French and half in English. I had to ask the man beside me to translate. ‘It’s my husband’s life!’ she screamed. ‘His whole life! Every bit of writing he’s ever done — I might as well have murdered him!’”

“This woman,” Raymond feels the need to elaborate. “She didn’t look much like a woman. More like a man. She was festooned with luggage but not at all weighed down with it because her legs were thick as pillars and her back broad as a quai.”

“And that’s why you were scared of her,” I remind my partner. “You should have heard him, Legrand: ‘If she were to tackle me, I’d snap in two.’ And when I doubted there was anything in that valise but air, he said, ‘Well, then, you’ll have an extra gasp’s worth if she stops you by sitting on your chest’… So when I finally agree to take the chance, what does my very own George Barrington do? He leaves me waiting twenty minutes under the clock tower, the case under my coat. I looked like I’d caught a case of goût.”

Raymond insists he was late for following the woman. He had to make sure she didn’t return and catch me in the act. “She wandered up and down the quai without a concern in the world. I had to watch her buy Evian, pick through the bookstalls, and chitchat with all the wolfish Americans trying to woo her. Like most of those men, her husband is a journalist. This much I learned. They’re all headed to Lausanne to cover the war conference. Switzerland! I would’ve guessed someplace cheaper and more staid. Somewhere with a lot of convents. Because this woman looked to me like a nun on vacation.”

Legrand grows tired of my friend’s clowning. He wants to know why I’m so sure a reward will be offered for the valise. After all, there was nothing in it but a fistful of paper. No cash, no bonds, no passport — just a blizzard of a sheaf, many handwritten, some typed, a batch of inky carbons.

“Congratulations,” I sniped when we first dumped the contents in an alley off the rue Diderot. “You could’ve sent me to the gaol for stealing words.” But Raymond had lost his sense of humor. He worked himself into a lather, kicking the papers, yelling he would throw them in the river, burn them, even take them to the toilet where they’d at least be of use. His disappointment had him so riled that he even turned on me. “What are you doing?” His lips snapped bitterly when I took up a random leaf. “You’re reading? You?”

I had to knock him down to stop his laughing.

How to tell Legrand that I’m working on intuition here? He would say that all intuition gets you is a first-class ticket to Devil’s Island. And then Raymond would chime in with his diagnosis: “It’s the fault of the posters. You should see him stare into them, Legrand! Just like hypnosis. I have to snap him out of his dreaming.”

We’re a people of pistons and dynamos now, but even standing shoulder to shoulder in a crowd of pumping legs, I’m aware of the passengers’ wanting to believe our rhythms are still our own.

In just six days we will witness the first departure of the Calais-Méditerranée Express, which people are calling Le Train Bleu because of the cobalt color of its cars. Its launch has kept the entire gare in breathless suspense for months already, thanks to the affiches and fliers that adorn nearly every post and pillar. I’ve felt the expectation in the pace of its throng. We’re a people of pistons and dynamos now, but even standing shoulder to shoulder in a crowd of pumping legs, I’m aware of the passengers’ wanting to believe our rhythms are still our own. We want to believe we haven’t been wound and set to march along to a tock that’s as constant as the hands on the clock that towers over the gare, reminding us not to miss the human pneumatique. To assure us that mass and dash are what we live for, they sell us a dream of not just new destinations but luxury rides, trimmed in gold and served with haute cuisine, an attendant on call to service every passing fancy. I’m not as naïve as Raymond thinks. As we followed the woman to the Lausanne Express, we passed an old man on a wooden bench checking his reflection in its brass fittings. I couldn’t decide if the exhilaration of speed merely had him winded, or whether he’d given up because he knew he couldn’t keep pace any more. Still, after years of parting coat buttons with a tap of two fingers and undoing watch bands with a flick, I can’t help but want to believe the illusion. After all, I’m a man who every day goes to the Gare de Lyon without ever managing to arrive anywhere else.

“Look at the handwriting,” I tell Legrand. “These aren’t just any jottings. Every letter went onto the paper as if being laid there for eternity. There’s not a slant or a serif that’s not sculpted. That means these words are important to somebody. And they’ll pay a price to get them back, I have faith.”

“More faith than good sense,” Raymond grunts. He packs the bowl of our pipe and holds it under a candle. A bluish curl of smoke snakes into the air. He drags off the other end and I can see the smoke billow through his teeth. “Imagine it! Michel has an eye for art even though he can’t make sense of a thing being said.”

“It’s not as if you read English either,” Legrand reminds him.

“No, but at least I can read! Michel likes to think he can outsmart the world, but how can you be such a genius when letters are nothing but stick figures to you?”

“I’ll learn soon enough,” I insist. “When I have the money to learn.”

Both of them snort. I would gladly remove Raymond’s teeth from his face if the hashish didn’t so soothe.

“You know English,” I say to Legrand. “Read them for us. Tell us what these pages say, so the great critic Raymond here can support his opinion that they’re worthless.”

Legrand shuffles through the sheets, skimming with an arched eye. He’s a serious man — he doesn’t even smoke with his customers.

“Whoever penned these pages,” he decides, “can’t write for shit.”

“Is there a name on them?”

“Yes, yes, a name and an address. 74, rue du Cardinal Lemoine. I know the neighborhood. There’s a dance hall on that block, the Bal du Printemps. The owner plays the accordion with bells wrapped around his ankles. I wouldn’t ask a whore to work in that sweatbox. Not because she’d faint but because she’d starve to death. Sympathies, Michel — it was your misfortune to steal from the one poor American in this city.”

I don’t tell him that I was the one who’d noted the woman’s poverty when Raymond first spotted her entering the station. But he’d pointed out something even more important: “She’s also American. And anything American in those bags will fetch more than if it came from the Place Vendôme.” Anything, it turns out, except paper.

We sit on a bench under one of the renderings for the blue train and wait. An entire day passes as we watch the crowd, reading faces, hoping to find the one anxious face in the rush. But the droves are expressionless.

“Yes, yes, I’m afraid this is trash of the worst sort,” continues Legrand. “And ‘trash’ is likely too great a compliment. Let’s call it tripe. This man on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine will probably pay you for relieving him of this nonsense.”

I ask what the man writes about.

“What else? The war. He fancies himself a novelist, I suppose. Just what the world needs — another writer. The world needs more of them about as much as it needs more pickpockets. Graces to God, listen to this.…”

Legrand reads from one of the typed pages. The sounds mean nothing to us, of course. All Raymond and I can focus on is the rhythm. The sentences are steady and staccato, but abbreviated. They make our Valjean sound like a stutterer.

“This man was in the war, no doubt,” Legrand concludes. “It’s clear he suffers from shell shock. Every sentence echoes with the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun. If I ever met the fool, I’d rip up his folios and roll him a free smoke. At least that would relax him enough to come up with some modifiers. That’s a little-known benefit of hashish, you know: it encourages the adjectives and adverbs.”

He snaps his fingers, excitedly.

“You know what we should do? We should rewrite these pages for this writer! Yes, show him how it’s done! Of course, Michel, you write words as well as you read them, but so what? We’ll make rolling papers out of this sheaf and you two can smoke every last strip to forget your lot in life. Then when the words mingle in your mind, you can say them out loud, and I’ll translate and transcribe. The result can’t be any worse than what this jester has done.”

But we don’t smoke them because when we return to the gare the next morning, heads still groggy, we expect to be greeted with posters announcing a reward. A whole agency exists devoted to lost passenger items. Fliers are as common on corkboards as promises for the blue train. So we sidle along the walls, trying not to appear anxious or conspicuous. This isn’t easy to do, since Raymond has to read each circular to me. One is for a purse, another for a passport. By about the fifth or sixth leaflet, I begin to think he lies. Maybe all these handbills cry out for the valise, and he’s simply set on destroying this writer’s work. So I push his nose close to each to ink-smudged scrap and make him say the words slowly. Lost: One Steamer Trunk, Dark, With Silver Buckles. Lost: One Suitcase, Child-Sized, Beige. Lost: One Animal Crate, Dog Inside. Please return our darling pet… It seems as if everyone has lost something of importance — just not their words.

“Maybe she didn’t tell her husband about the valise,” suggests Raymond.

“It would’ve been the first thing he’d ask about. Probably before he even kissed her hello.”

We sit on a bench under one of the renderings for the blue train and wait. An entire day passes as we watch the crowd, reading faces, hoping to find the one anxious face in the rush. But the droves are expressionless, just footfalls following a motion. Finally, when Raymond can no longer stand the hunger, he picks the pocket of a mustachioed man in a bowler hat.

That night he dines on steak and beer, but I’m too sated with disappointment to eat.

We return a second day, but it’s clear by then that whether we want them or not the papers are ours. Reluctantly, I have to agree with Legrand. The man can live without his manuscripts. To someone who can’t make sense of letters, letting go of words is unimaginable.

“There’s only one thing left to do.”

“Yes,” Raymond agrees. “We get ready to work the blue train. A better class of clientèle. Its passengers will probably pay thirty francs to retrieve a three-franc purse.”

“Not yet. Legrand said there was an address on those papers. We’ll go track the man down and ransom the valise in person.”

The man can live without his manuscripts. To someone who can’t make sense of letters, letting go of words is unimaginable.

So we cross the river following the quai along to the Jardin des Plantes and around to the Place de la Contrescarpe. Every few feet the sidewalks are clogged with flower sellers standing on purple patches of dye whose splatter dribbles over the street curbs. Autobuses rumble by, choking the air with the heat of exhaust. At least the smell of burnt metal and gasoline is preferable to the odor of the drunks tottering to keep their marc from leaking out their lips. The trees, too, seem to sprawl, their foliage covering tall, cheap buildings topped by white plaster buttressed beneath with brown, with mismatched curtains in every window. Suddenly our poverty doesn’t seem so overwhelming.

“Oh, look,” Raymond says, pointing to the Boucherie Chevaline across the street. “When we’re through conducting our business we can gorge on horse.…”

I ignore him as I rap on the entry to No. 74. The door pulls back, and we’re greeted with the smell of a lavatory, which I determine is the door next to the first-floor landing. A large stairway corkscrews the height of the building’s interior, dwarfing the woman who scowls at us as if we are a pair of unwanted solicitors. But when I ask if an American lives in her building, her eyes widen.

“Oh, it’s so horrible! My husband and I adored them so much. My husband operates a cab and took the poor girl to the station himself — he’s apologized over and over since the Monsieur came back last night. But the man won’t speak. We will be surprised — yes, very surprised — if they return from their vacation as a couple. One can’t lose something so important to another and think it will be forgiven….”

Raymond and I pretend we don’t know what she’s talking about. We tell her we’ve stopped by to return money the man had kindly lent us.

“You’re almost too late then. He has already taken his suitcase to return to Switzerland. He said there was no point in staring into an empty drawer. But his train isn’t until later this afternoon. My husband offered to drive him to the gare, but he declined. He said he was going to the Café des Amateurs first. That’s how I know he’s despondent, no matter how he tries to hide it. He’s not the kind of man to wade in that cesspool….”

When we press the woman, she directs us to the café. The instructions aren’t complicated because it’s located right around the corner on the rue Mouffetard. And it, too, smells like a toilet. Raymond and I hold our breath as we poke our heads in, peering past chalk slates and fliers advertising strangely named apéritifs. The American isn’t hard to pick out. For one thing, he sits alone. For another, he’s the only one who doesn’t look like he’s content to luxuriate in a pissoir. The man’s table is cluttered with as many empty glasses as the debauchees populating the place, but his eyes are fixed to its center. As we watch, he lifts a pencil, writes what can’t be more than four words in a notebook, and then sets the pencil down. Then he just stares at his handiwork.

“What are you waiting for?” demands Raymond. “Go tell him he can have his valise back for a hundred francs.”

I daydream of the man’s handwriting. The shapes of the letters, because I can’t read them, resemble sculpture.

“We’re too late. He doesn’t need the suitcase anymore.”

“You can’t be serious! Look at him — Napoleon wasn’t that dejected after Waterloo. He’s lucky we found him before he spent his last centime on a prostitute and an overdose of morphine!”

But I’ve already pulled away from the window and am retracing our route back to the Place de la Contrescarpe and the jardin. Raymond nips at my heels, calling me a coward and a buffoon. I’d like to knock him down again, but why bother? He could never understand the explanation. If a man can lose something supposedly so important to him and still muster the concentration that I saw on that man’s face, then he really only needed it for its losing in the first place. Maybe there was a time when his wife was fresh off the train or when he returned he would’ve taken the valise back, but not now.

In less than two days he’s already grown beyond it.

“What did I tell you fools?” Legrand gloats that night.

“Don’t tell me,” Raymond sniffs. “Tell him.”

But even if Legrand rubs my nose in my failure at least he takes pity on our misfortunes. This time he donates rather than discounts our plug of hash. His only condition is that we do without the pipe. But we would even if he didn’t ask. As our Valjean reads page after page of the American’s lost writing, Raymond and I shred each discarded sheet into long strips. Then we break our nub into halves and wrap them tight. And then we smoke. The paper tastes horrible, of course. Nor do the tatters stay lit for long. We have to puff and huff and burn the tips of our noses before we feel the hashish seep into our blood.

“He’ll go to his grave wondering who we are and where his precious work went,” Raymond insists, blowing bitter smoke rings.

But I think of words, not people.

There are the words Valjean reads, his voice mocking them, and the words on paper that retreat into ash as I light each improvised cigarette. They all mingle in my head like the plumes of smoke that curl around us. I can feel them accelerate in my imagination. They race without losing shape, stately and ornate as the blue train, carrying me places I could never imagine.

Someday, I think, I must learn to write them all down.