The Man with the Black Feather

A retired Paris manufacturer of rubber stamps, touring the old prison of the Conciergerie, finds a document two centuries old written in his own hand, and comes to believe that he carries the soul of Cartouche, the eighteenth-century brigand. Leroux wrote it in 1903 for his own paper, Le Matin, before the Yellow Room made his name, and it is the strangest thing he did: half comic novel of a Paris bourgeois, half nightmare of a man who cannot tell which of his instincts are his own. Fifty-seven plates of Paris streets and cafés by Bonnard and Utrillo, from 1820 to 1928, follow the stamp-maker through the city he cannot remember living in.