As I was tormenting myself with such thoughts, distinctly aware, so Austerlitz continued, that my face was being marked by the signs of that anguish which so often assails me, I was approached by one of the library staff called Henri Lemoine, who had recognized me from those early years of mine in Paris when I went daily to the rue Richelieu. Jacques Austerlitz, inquired Lemoine, stopping by my desk and leaning slightly down to me, and so, said Austerlitz, we began a long, whispered conversation in the Haut-de-jardin reading room, which was gradually emptying now, about the dissolution, in line with the inexorable spread of processed data, of our capacity to remember, and about the collapse, l’effondrement, as Lemoine put it, of the Bibliothèque Nationale which is already under way. The new library building, which in both its entire layout and its near-ludicrous internal regulation seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy, might be described, so Lemoine thought, said Austerlitz, as the official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past. At a certain point in our conversation, said Austerlitz, and in response to a casual request of mine, Lemoine took me up to the eighteenth floor of the southeast tower, where one can look down from the so-called belvedere at the entire urban agglomeration which has risen over the millennia from the land beneath its foundations, which is now entirely hollowed out: a pale limestone range, a kind of excrescence extending the concentric spread of its incrustations far beyond the boulevards Davout, Soult, Poniatowski, Masséna, and Kellermann, and on into the outermost periphery beyond the suburbs, which now lay in the haze of twilight. A few miles to the southeast there was a faint green mark in the even gray, with a kind of blunt cone rising from it which Lemoine identified as the monkeys’ hill in the Bois de Vincennes. Closer to hand, we saw the convoluted traffic routes on which trains and cars crawled back and forth like black beetles and caterpillars. It was strange, said Lemoine, but up here he always had the impression that life moved silently and slowly down below, that the body of the city had been infected by an obscure disease spreading underground, and I remembered, said Austerlitz, when Lemoine made this remark, the winter months of the year 1959 during which I was studying the six-volume work pointing me the way in my own research, on Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXème siècle, which Maxime du Camp, who had previously traveled the deserts of the Orient that are formed, as he said, from the dust of the dead, began to write around 1890, after he was inspired by an overwhelming vision on the pont Neuf, and which he finished only seven years later. From the other side of the belvedere story, said Austerlitz, you looked north over the transverse ribbon of the Seine, the Marais quarter, and the Bastille. An inky wall of stormclouds was building up above the city as it sank into shadow, and soon no more could be distinguished of its towers, palaces, and monuments than the spectral white dome of the Sacré-Coeur. We were standing only a foot behind the glass panels which reach all the way to the ground. As soon as you looked down at the light-colored promenade deck and the darker crowns of the trees emerging from it, the pull exerted by the abyss below took hold of you, forcing you to step back. Sometimes, so Lemoine told me, said Austerlitz, he felt the current of time streaming round his temples and brow when he was up here, but perhaps, he added, that is only a reflex of the awareness formed in my mind over the years of the various layers which have been superimposed on each other to form the carapace of the city. Thus, on the waste land between the marshaling yard of the gare d’Austerlitz and the pont de Tolbiac where this Babylonian library now rises, there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris. I believe they cleared some forty thousand apartments at that time, said Lemoine, in an operation lasting months, for which purpose they requisitioned the entire pantechnicon fleet of the Paris Union of Furniture Removers, and an army of no fewer than fifteen hundred removal men was brought into action. All who had taken part in any way in this highly organized program of expropriation and reutilization, said Lemoine, the people in charge of it, the sometimes rival staffs of the occupying power and the financial and fiscal authorities, the residents’ and property registries, the banks and insurance agencies, the police, the transport firms, the landlords and caretakers of the apartment buildings, must undoubtedly have known that scarcely any of those interned in Drancy would ever come back. For the most part the valuables, the bank deposits, the shares and the houses and business premises ruthlessly seized at the time, said Lemoine, remain in the hands of the city and the state to this day. In the years from 1942 onwards everything our civilization has produced, whether for the embellishment of life or merely for everyday use, from Louis XVI chests of drawers, Meissen porcelain, Persian rugs and whole libraries, down to the last saltcellar and pepper mill, was stacked there in the Austerlitz-Tolbiac storage depot. A man who had worked in it told me not long ago, said Lemoine, that there were even special cardboard cartons set aside to hold the rosin removed, for the sake of greater cleanliness, from confiscated violin cases. Over five hundred art historians, antique dealers, restorers, joiners, clockmakers, furriers, and couturiers brought in from Drancy and guarded by a contingent of Indochinese soldiers were employed day after day, in fourteen-hour shifts, to put the goods coming into the depot in proper order and sort them by value and kind—silver cutlery with silver cutlery, cooking pans with cooking pans, toys with toys, and so forth. More than seven hundred train loads left from here for the ruined cities of the Reich. Not infrequently, said Lemoine, Party grandees on visits from Germany and high-ranking SS and Wehrmacht officers stationed in Paris would walk around the halls of the depot, known to the prisoners as Les Galéries d’Austerlitz, with their wives or other ladies, choosing drawing room furniture for a Grunewald villa, or a Sèvres dinner service, a fur coat or a Pleyel piano. The most valuable items, of course, were not sent off wholesale to the bombed cities, and no one will now admit to knowing where they went, for the fact is that the whole affair is buried in the most literal sense beneath the foundations of our pharaonic President’s Grande Bibliothèque, said Lemoine. The last of the light faded away down on the empty promenades. The treetops of the pine grove, which from this high vantage point had resembled moss-covered ground, now formed a regular black rectangle. For a while, said Austerlitz, we stood together in silence on the library belvedere, looking out over the city where it lay now sparkling in the light of its lamps.