When I accepted the invitation-my own handwriting was appalling, no match for the calligraphy of the invitation-I expected the evening would conclude with Tilbot trying to sell me a folio of etchings or some Sevres supposedly rescued from the ashes of the Revolution.

Clearly it was boredom that got me from my bed, but the invitation was also a welcome escape from the company of bourgeois lawyers. I will be disliked or even killed for saying this, but it is only with nobles, those of my own blood, that I have ever felt completely at home, even an extreme conservative like Tilbot.

It was early summer, the most asthmatic time of the year. I strolled toward the Hotel Juste through the Saint-Louis quarter. Closed mansions. Neglected gardens. No matter the seasons, Versailles was, generally speaking, stone dead. Of the two hundred hotels that had thrived before the Revolution, there were perhaps fifty doing any sort of trade at all. If Monsieur had expected the Hotel Juste to be as it had been in the years of Louis XVI, he would be correct only to the extent that it had no water closet. Certainly he would no longer find a mixed crowd, comtes side by side with opera singers, or eager dancers who had just performed a gala for the king. All dead. All gone. At the Juste I came upon an attendant who, like a common actor cast to play a duke, gave no more service than waving a gloved hand toward the staircase. Such was the state of servants since the Revolution. They consented to serve but were ashamed to obey. They had begun to treat their masters as the unjust usurpers of their rights.

I set off up the staircase whose walls revealed the flaking common paint which had once affected to be marble. How sad to live in the shadows of the dead.

I knocked and discovered, to my pleasant surprise, apartments very like the Autumn Room of the Chateau de Barfleur.

Monsieur welcomed me from a strange position, his single arm resting along the mantel which, being Carrara marble, was a monument to the taste and glory of Louis XVI.

"Complete?" he asked, not me, another. For me, his visitor, the great man betrayed no speck of interest.

"Don't move," this other said.

And there I beheld the awful footman or factotum. Reclining on a canopied chaise.

Dear God, I thought, now here's a comic turn, for he was affecting to make a charcoal portrait of his posing master, who would not turn his head toward me. If dogs stood up and walked I could not have been more discombobulated.

"Perroquet," I heard Monsieur call him.

So he keeps company with a parrot. Of course.

The creature, who had previously spoken in the most higgledy-piggledy patois, now answered in tones identical to his master. "Just one moment," said he. I thought, Dare he mock him thus? Does his master tolerate it? But what were these eccentricities to me?

Monsieur posed with his body arranged so that his amputation was cleverly denied. The glowing fire reflected in the fluted columns, and danced like wraiths across brocade and upholstery-laurel leaves, bell-flowers, shepherds and shepherdesses. The scene had the warmth and glory of that earlier time-four arched openings separated by carved pilasters, walls covered with tapestry and brocade-and yet there, on the periphery of the canvas, was this fraudulent parrot. Velazquez, I thought, with no one to share my wit. Monkey, dwarf, parrot.

I snuffed my candle and set it on the mantel.

"I had imagined you would be taller," my host said at last.

I had imagined he would have more teeth. He had grown older, balder, with his mouth set in a peculiar sarcastic mold.

"You have the Barfleur family markings," he continued, alluding to the tiny wounds where leeches had bitten me so recently. The familiarity this sentence presumed might have been offensive and yet it was offered with a strange and unexpected tenderness. What to make of this ruined warrior.

The missing arm indicated his misfortune, but his eyes showed you he was, even at the age of seventy, a man still dedicated to excitements and danger. When his royalist war against the Revolution failed he had become like a stream that enters an underworld of lakes and tunnels, from which secret life it will emerge where no geographer could predict. Where this stream had traveled during the reign of Napoleon, I did not know, although the peculiar relationship with this servant suggested something very subterranean indeed.

"Ah," said Monsieur, "you've already met M. Perroquet."

Monsieur, seeing with what hesitation I took the servant's proffered hand, made a comic face. I wondered was he drunk.

He joined me on the settee and although I was supported with all the strength and grace of the royal workshops, my host occupied his territory less neatly. He was broad of shoulder and chest. Like an American, he wore no wig and this, paradoxically, served to magnify his leathery head-ten inches from ear to ear, at least, a fringe of curly red-brown hair around his pate. He smiled at me. Those teeth were awful.

"Mr. Parrot," Monsieur said, nodding to the creature who had once more set to sketching, "is a man of many parts, not one of which will you find in Linnaeus. A gentleman who travels cannot be at the mercy of servants."

I thought, What is this leathery creature?

I was angry. Yet now-as I saw the dishes begin their majestic procession through the doors-I understood he wished to do me a signal honor. We were to start with the melon and follow with the eels and carp, and the larded rabbit on the spit. To this end we sat at table.

"So," said Monsieur, "you've been at Guizot's lectures."

I thought, The servant must be told to leave the room.

"Six times you attended," said Monsieur. "Blacqueville, ten times."

The Parrot caught my eye a moment but returned to drawing.

"It is not the Parrot you should worry about," Monsieur observed. "He is the only one you should trust."

"And you, sir?" I asked with all the distance our language so thoughtfully makes possible. "In what way should I trust you?"

For answer he produced a small chapbook from beneath his napkin. I thought, He wants to sell me something. Then I understood it was only a cloth-bound order book. From this he now read the following, pausing for effect, raising his eyes like an actor at the Comedie-Francaise.

"'The Middle Ages,'" he began, "'were the heroic age of France, the age of poetry and romance, the true realm of fancy, when fancy was stronger than we may think possible in the lives of men.'"

It was Guizot. That is, he was quoting evidence. The hair on my arms rose inside my shirt.

"'On the other hand, gentlemen, the hatred that the Middle Ages have aroused is even easier to explain.'"

Three weeks before, I had transcribed these very lines at a lecture. It was now clear to me, and to my bowels, that someone had observed the very movement of my pencil.

"'The common people were so unhappy during that period of their existence, they emerged so damaged and with so much effort from the condition into which it plunged them, that a deep instinct makes its memory agonizing… The French Revolution, gentlemen, is no more than a defining explosion of hatred against the ideas, the manners, and the laws which were bequeathed to us by the Middle Ages.'"

In the time of Bonaparte the secret service had bred like peasants, and there were many who detested the regime but took the pay. Might M. de Tilbot, I wondered, have become one of that sorry caste? He had lost his lands in the Revolution. What income might he have? Was he spying for the court?

"You imagine I agree?" I demanded.

Monsieur lifted his wine the better to examine it against the candlelight. "You, Olivier de Garmont, are in a very bad position."

"You will tell my mother, that is what you mean?"

"Your mother is a more supple and subtle creature than you could ever imagine."