DNA tells you all the secrets of life,’ he used to say. Except for one—how to live it.

There was a basket at her feet. She reached into it and lifted out the head of a young woman, a marquise. She wore Bourbon white to her death, but wears the tricolor now - white cheeks, blue lips, red dripping from her neck. Long live the revolution.

I played a role. That is what actors do. But I played it too well. I went too far. And by the time I wanted to stop, to take a bow and leave the stage, it was too late.

You are a ghost, Andi," she says. "Almost gone." I look at her. I want to say something but I can't get the words out. She squeezes my hands. "Come back to us," she says. And she's gone.

One expects decent people to stand up for the good of all. Decent people shut their doors and hide behind them as decent people do. Massacres could never happen if it weren't for decent people.

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.

Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?