One night while they were standing on a viaduct watching the body of some sad unfortunate being fished out of the water, the painter said thoughtfully, "I have run into ghosts everywhere. One of them tormented me for more than a year when I was a customs inspector."

Marie-Lucien did not believe in ghosts. Belief in ghosts would have required him to believe in something beyond death, a world of the spirit. He had been, as a young man, at the battle of Sedan where thousands had died; and he had watched his wife and his son on their death beds; and he had never had the least inkling that any scrap or glimpse of the people he loved remained anywhere in the universe. He had come to the unshakable conclusion that death was unremitting and permanent; death, he believed, was death. He said to the painter, to turn him aside from his ghosts, "You were a douanier?"

Rousseau smiled modestly. "Nothing so grand. A mere inspector." But he was not put off the track. He said, "Whenever I was on duty this ghost would stand ten paces away, annoying me, poking fun." He turned to Marie-Lucien with a somewhat amused grimace. "Letting out smelly farts just to nauseate me."

Marie-Lucien smiled slightly.

"I shot at him, but a phantom apparently cannot die again. Whenever I tried to grab him, he vanished into the ground and reappeared somewhere else."

Marie-Lucien asked him uninterestedly-mere politeness-"Was he someone you knew? An old acquaintance?"

"Not at all. He was not haunting me, but the post, which was at the Gate of Arcueil. When I left that post, I never saw him again. I suppose something must have happened there, perhaps something in the way he was killed, that caused his soul to attach itself to the gate, or to the person guarding the gate."

At the muddy edge of the canal several men were now standing in the glare of gas lamps, surrounding the naked body of a young woman, a woman only recently dead, her body still lovely, unblemished, not sufflated, her long brown hair from this distance seeming to hang in a neat braid across one shoulder and breast. The painter's expression, looking down at the scene, slowly softened into satisfaction. "I don't like to read the big tabloids that talk a lot of politics, what I read is the Magasin Pittoresque." He laughed. "The more drowned bodies in the river the greater my reading pleasure."

Marie-Lucien was taken aback. "That's a terrible thing to say."

"Is it?" Rousseau said, in a tone of complete sincerity, and might have been about to turn to Marie-Lucien to collect his answer, but suddenly swept his hand and his glance skyward. "There goes that poor woman's soul," he said, with surprised delight.

Marie-Lucien looked quickly where Rousseau had pointed but saw only the full moon hanging low and white on the night sky, as perfectly round as if it had been drawn with a compass. "What?" he said in frustration. He did not at all believe the painter had seen a drowned soul flying up to heaven but couldn't help his question, or its meaning: Not, What did you say? but What did you see?

"Ah, such peace!" the painter said quietly, which he may have meant as an answer.

In the early part of August, Rousseau came to Marie-Lucien's door unexpectedly-it was morning, and Marie-Lucien was still drinking his terrible coffee, still wearing the rumpled clothes he had slept in. The painter took hold of his arm and said, "Le Ménagerie! Best seen at night when the animals are at their most alert, but unfortunately open only in the daylight. Ten centimes and you're in." Marie-Lucien attempted to refuse. It was one thing, their nightly strolls, the two not-quite-old men leaning into fences, peering at trees and flowering shrubs in dark public parks and private gardens; but the daylight hours he intended still to keep for his own use, which was not grieving, as his friends had supposed, but a prolonged, expectant waiting for his own death.

Rousseau, of course, would not be put off. He had a long-established morning practice of strolling through one or another of his favorite amusement parks, and he had made up his mind to share that pleasure with Marie-Lucien. Shortly, they were out on the lively daytime streets, and Rousseau, brisk with morning energy, led the way to the Zoological Gardens, where he spent a good long while studying a mangy lion rocking restlessly in a space too small to accommodate pacing; and kinkajou monkeys and gibbon apes quietly pining in their cages. None of this was of much interest to Marie-Lucien, or only insofar as to strengthen his old opinion that he lived in a brutal, godless universe. He stood back from the animal pens, shifting his weight lionlike in anxious boredom.

When finally they left the zoo, Rousseau insisted they must visit the Palmarium, and the Orangerie, as well; and inside those hothouses, Marie-Lucien felt as if he had slipped once again into a dream. Confronted with a spectacle of perpetual novelty-huge Paulownia trees, tropical palms, mango and pineapple trees, thick-stalked grasses taller than any man-he seemed to recognize everything, to rediscover it all in his memories. It struck him suddenly that the foliage under the translucent glass vault was the most exalted green he had ever seen outside Rousseau's jungle canvases, and when he said this to the painter-a bit of mild praise coming rather late in their acquaintance-Rousseau replied offhandedly, "I don't seek and invent, my dear, I only find and discover."

"Well then, it seems to me, you find and discover strangeness above all," Marie-Lucien said, which the painter took as true praise and which provoked in him a pleased laugh.

In the weeks that followed, because Marie-Lucien had little interest in visiting the Zoo or the Monkey Palace again, they confined their morning walks to the Orangerie, the Palmarium and the Botanical Gardens, which Rousseau said was not an inconvenience. The animals in the menagerie were, after all, not suitable studies for his art-always either reclining or sitting in a torpor-and his genuine models (his expression guileless as a child's) were the wild ones who visited him at night.

One morning as the two men walked back through the streets from le Jardin des Plantes to the apartments, the painter wrapped an arm about Marie-Lucien's shoulders and said, "Come into the studio, M. Bernal, see what strangeness I've been about in recent days. The woman has been posing for me, the woman we met on the quai."

Marie-Lucien had no recollection of meeting a woman on the quai, but this did not surprise him, as the painter had a practice of striking up conversation with virtually anybody they passed, even prostitutes and obvious villains; and Marie-Lucien the practice of not joining in. "I am not Bernal," he said mildly, but only from habit.

The painting Rousseau wished him to see was of a nude reclining on a Bordeaux-red chaise inexplicably set down in the midst of a jungle lush with impossibly huge Egyptian lotus blossoms. The work was far from completed-the foliage flourishing before the woman-but Marie-Lucien could already see that she was no one he recognized; or, given the painter's awkward draftsmanship, perhaps he would not have recognized her even if she had been someone he knew well. It was a very strange painting, of course, very much in line with the greater part of his work, and the sort of thing that caused Marie-Lucien to lose his foothold in the world: In the trees were exotic birds and monkeys, in the sky a perfectly round bone-white moon, in the foliage a glimpse of an elephant, as well as lurking lions and serpents; and oddest of all, a Negro snake charmer holding a musette to his lips. Even half-finished as it was, the painting gave an impression of stiff, stark peace, of Dantesque silence.

Marie-Lucien's wife had died slowly of consumption; for years before her death she had been unable to engage him in sexual congress, and it had been years since he had bothered to abuse himself. At the intersection of circumstance and advancing age, he had become celibate without taking a decision, and was somewhat interested in the fact that paintings and photographs of naked women no longer aroused him. In any case, this particular painting of a nude was not, to his eye, erotic. Her ankles were chastely crossed, her pubis neatly hidden behind the flesh of her thighs. One thick arm outstretched on the back of the chaise seemed in gesture toward the snake charmer or the lions, but whether this was to beckon or fend off, was difficult to know. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, two twisted strands of her hair falling across one of her perfectly globular breasts. It seemed to Marie-Lucien that this was a woman not ashamed to be naked-not living in the world he knew, but in some universe absent the Biblical tale of sin.