A free man, he took his own way in his own time to the suburban station, bought his own ticket, returned to Paris by himself. Where he came up out of the Metro nobody knows, perhaps not himself, nor where he wandered in the city while defecting. At eleven o'clock at night he was standing at the parapet of the Solferino Bridge, a short man of forty-seven in a shoddy suit, a free man. He watched the lights of the bridge and of farther bridges tremble on the black river running quietly. Up and down the river on either bank stood the asylums: the Government of France, the Embassies of America and England. He had walked past them all.

Perhaps it was too late at night to enter them. Standing on the bridge there in the middle, between the Left Bank and the Right Bank, he thought: There are no hiding places left. There are no thrones; no wolves, no boars; even the lions of Africa are dying out. The only safe place is the zoo.

But he had never cared much about being safe, and now thought that he did not care much about hiding either, having found something better: his family, his inheritance. Here he had at last walked in the garden larger than life, on paths where his older brothers had gone before him, crowned. After that he really could not take refuge in the zoo. He went on across the bridge and under the dark arches of the Louvre, returning to his hotel. Knowing now that he was both a king and a thief and so was at home anywhere, what turned him to his own land was mere fidelity. For what else should move a man, these days? Kingly he strode past the secret-police agent in the hotel lobby, hiding under his coat the stolen, inexhaustible fountains.

1960

The Barrow

NIGHT came down along the snowy road from the mountains. Darkness ate the village, the stone tower of Vermare Keep, the barrow by the road. Darkness stood in the corners of the rooms of the Keep, sat under the great table and on every rafter, waited behind the shoulders of each man at the hearth.