Vincent stepped over the windowsill and sprang into the arms of his sister, Albertine, and of Charlotte, who were taking refuge with him during their stay in Paris… Atlantis, silent until now, was filling up with sounds, emotions, words. Each evening our grand-mother's stories uncovered some new fragment of this universe engulfed by time.

And then there was the hidden treasure. The suitcase filled with old papers, the massive bulk of which, when we had ventured under the big bed in Charlotte 's room, alarmed us. We tugged on the catches, we lifted the lid. What a mass of paper! Adult life, in all its tedium and all its disturbing seriousness, stopped our breath with its smell of dust and things shut away… How could we have guessed that it was in the midst of these old newspapers, these letters with inconceivable dates, that our grandmother would find us the photo of the three deputies in their boat?…

It was Vincent who had passed on to Charlotte the taste for such journalistic sketches and urged her to collect them by cutting these brief chronicles of the day out of the newspapers. After a time, he must have thought, they would be seen in quite a different light, like silver coins colored by the patina of centuries.

During one of those summer evenings filled with the scented breeze of the steppes, a remark from a passerby under our balcony jolted us out of our reverie.

"No, I promise you. They said it on the radio. He went out into space."

And another voice, dubious, answered, receding into the distance, "Do you take me for a fool or what? 'He went out…' But up there there's nowhere you can go out. It's like bailing out of a plane without a parachute…"

This exchange brought us back to reality. All about us there stretched the huge empire that took a particular pride in the exploration of the unfathomable sky above our head.