For us the Père Lachaise was far from being a tranquil cemetery, animated only by the respectful whispers of a few tourists. Not a bit of it: armed men ran among the tombs in all directions, exchanging gunshots and hiding behind the funerary monuments. Recounted to us once, this battle between the Communards and the Versailles government troops was forever associated in our minds with the name Père Lachaise. Furthermore we also heard the echo of this shoot-out in the catacombs of Paris. For according to Charlotte, they did battle in those labyrinths too, with bullets shattering the skulls of the dead of several centuries. And if the night sky above Atlantis was lit by the comet and by German zeppelins, the clear blue of day was filled with the regular chirring of a monoplane: a certain Louis Blériot was crossing the channel.

The choice of events was more or less subjective. Their sequence was chiefly governed by our feverish desire to know, by our random questions. But whatever significance, they never escaped the general rule: the chandelier that fell from the ceiling during the performance of Faust at the Opéra immediately unleashed its crystalline explosion in all the auditoriums of Paris. For us real theater implied a light tinkling from an enormous glass cluster, ripe enough to become detached from the ceiling at the sound of a musical flourish or an alexandrine… And as for real Parisian circus, we knew that the lion tamer was always torn apart by wild beasts, like the "Negro called Delmonico" who was attacked by his seven lionesses.

Charlotte sometimes drew this information from the Siberian suitcase, sometimes from her childhood memories. A number of her stories went back to a still earlier age, related by her uncle or by Albertine, who themselves had inherited them from their parents.