Biography is simpler than analysis. About what interests us most, it tells us absolutely nothing. Less still!
—Paul Valéry

He loved the smell of burned toast. He even threw bread into the fireplace for the sheer pleasure of inhaling the fumes. In the 1860s he ordered his cider from Normandy a hundred and ten liters at a time, owned shares in the Indiana Southern American Railway, and occupied a ground-floor box at the Opéra. He collected canes and handkerchiefs with as much discernment as he collected pictures. A denizen of Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement for practically a lifetime, he was a familiar figure, in his salt-and-pepper tweed suit, by the 1880s. His perfect recall for the peculiarities of speech and gesture culminated in feats of mime and storytelling that made him a sought-after dinner guest, despite a deplorable disposition; during one period he dined at a different house nearly every night of the week. When he told a joke, he gave his performance a strange little twist by immediately extending his hand to each laughing friend like a victorious impresario, “dites quoi?” being his inevitable punctuation mark.

Increasingly as he grew older, he entertained at home, subjecting his visitors to a decor of dust-laden Louis-Philippe, and to the waterlogged macaroni and shredded marmalade of his housekeeper, Zoé Closier. He weighed a hundred and forty-two pounds. Although he instructed his servant to keep the world at bay, he was perfectly capable of receiving a young caller naked except for