One evening he was especially alert and gay, and I not less so. We were in the immense drawing-room, which, like the dining-room, overlooked the canal. Dinner was finished — we dined at six, the Bruges hour — and Alresca lay on his invalid’s couch, ejecting from his mouth rings of the fine blue smoke of a Javanese cigar, a box of which I had found at the tobacco shop kept by two sisters at the corner of the Grande Place. I stood at the great central window, which was wide open, and watched the whiteness of the swans moving vaguely over the surface of the canal in the oncoming twilight. The air was warm and heavy, and the long, high-pitched whine of the mosquito swarms — sole pest of the city — had already begun.

“Alresca,” I said, “your days as an invalid are numbered.”