How quietly the fear of contagion slips into a tale about collecting and time travel (memory work). Not so odd that the illustration of curtain call (a reproduction of French stamp itself illustrating a ballet tableau by Degas) should accompany the last of the sections in what was a very charming book. After all the story of the séjour is coming to a close, time for an identificatory moment with the solo artists curtseying towards the audience. In a sense the accompanying two paragraphs are a refusal to occupy the position of audience to another's performance. Fine perhaps in a child narrator but a blemish on the previous fine getting-acquainted anecdotes, examples of encounters with the other and the self.

An editor could perhaps have spotted the destructive note of disonance but not under the previous title of publication [Postmark Paris: a Little Album of Memories]. Albums and memories are expected to be loose and unconnected jumbles of items. A story is something else.

Tempting to take scissors to the book [the 2005 reprint of the 1995 publication] and excise this:

ENCORE

Then we went home. Back in California my grandfather gave me his big old stamp book. Bound in brown paper, it contained hundreds of valuable stamps from all over -- from places I didn't recognize and countries that no longer existed.

It felt odd to receive someone else's collection. I thanked my grandfather but kept his collection on a shelf separate from my own. My little album was full of the people and places I had know that year. Opening it, I could always visit them again.

Perhaps their ancestors historical encounters with many a pope by the name of Innocent have led French speakers to believe that the simple minded are not innocuous.

Skip the scissors. There is room for marginalia. Lots of white space for the counterdiscourse to inscribe its selves imagined otherwise. Enough to begin.

When one glosses the child-narrator's obstinate refusal of to make use of an offering and thus complete its transformation into true gift, one comes to ask whatever had the grandfather done to the child? And the answer is evident not done but failed to do: assist an imagination to exercise and enlarge its scope. The opening section tells all. The child-narrator marks the acquisition of knowledge as a disappointment. The first stamp bought in Paris is sent to a friend in California, a wild friend described as similar to the Annie Oakley figure the child-narrator projected onto the stamp. But the projection falters: "Later, when I figured out that the gun on the stamp was an old musical instrument called a lute, I was disappointed." Odd child. Perhaps there was nothing a grandfather could do.

The publisher had more power to pay attention to nuance and detail. After all, the 2005 edition incorrectly lists in the colophon the birth date for Claude Garamond as 1840 and yet correctly has him dying in 1561.

Paris 1840; San Francisco 1995. Strange how some grown ups come to silently re-embed fear in constructions of childhood and endanger more lives.

I'll not attempt to ban this book like a pontiff might. I'll not even mar its beauty. I will be very careful about presenting it as a gift. I will keep it for a while as a reminder of how ideology seeps into my reading and out of what I read. And I will place it beside Edmund White's 1994 Our Paris: Sketches from Memory illustrated by Hubert Sorin (d. 1994) set in Fournier [a typeface named after Pierre Simon Fournier (1712-1768)]. Sorin and White lived together as lovers and worked on the book while Sorin was dying of AIDS. That book I would give out freely to young and old. It too ends with an almost refusal of a gift.

When I look around our "House of Life" (the title of Mario Praz's book), I feel a bit apprehensive. Hubert has said from the beginning that he's decorating it for me so I'll have a place to live after he's gone, though I can scarcely imagine rattling around it alone.

"'Full of' is not 'them', little girl" -- oh where is the fox from The Little Prince when you need a good advisor. "When visiting hours are closed, forever, they dwell in imagination not memory."