For three weeks, the ownerless file had occupied the left corner of Marc Séverac’s desk.
There was nothing impressive about it: a sand-colored cardboard folder, two flaps warped by damp, and on the spine a label he had written himself in black marker—**A-00**. A stood for “autobiographical.” The double zero meant nothing yet. It was a researcher’s convenience, somewhere to put what refused to fit elsewhere without honoring it with a category.
That morning he filed a letter from 1911 whose author claimed to have recognized, in a city he had never visited, the bedroom of a woman who died before he was born. The sheet was authentic. So was the ink, as far as a cursory examination could tell. The account, however, had been copied twice before reaching the folder. Marc had underlined this sentence in his note: *authenticity of the medium ≠ authenticity of the statement*.
“You’re keeping it anyway?” Claire Malvoisin asked from the other desk.
“I’m keeping the fact that it exists.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Exactly.”
Claire rolled her eyes. She had a way of teasing him by making him clarify his thinking. Marc liked her for it, even on days he needed to be allowed to be right more quickly.
The research office on rue Lhomond was too small for its borrowed boxes and too expensive for what they did there. Two first-floor rooms, a consultation room whose radiators knocked whenever the building’s boiler decided to work, and a glass-enclosed cupboard Marc grandly called the repository. They studied how memories were constructed in old testimonies: dating errors, retouched family accounts, false memories of disasters, memories borrowed from newspapers. Nothing, in theory, to justify getting home at nine.
His phone vibrated on a copy of the *Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique*.
**Agnès — 5:42 p.m.**
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