His date of birth is only safe to put forward in the plural. If we stick to the official date—as in, the one specified by the Party—he was twenty-eight in 1918. It’s only arbitrarily that you also choose to use it: your motive is convenience.

This bedsit—a furnished room—no one can locate. There was a hotel number 94 rue de Charonne, for unmarried men at that, but it closed in 1914. Nguyên lived alone, hidden, his hands battered by frostbite and inflammation; there was nothing particularly charming about his isolation. It must be said that the native of Hoàng Trù, a village somewhere in the north of his country, had already spent two years at sea: aboard ships, freighters, liners, boats. All words for which the horizon is more than a straight line. On them he had learned how to handle spoons and forks, peel potatoes, polish kitchens, and serve the officers. Van Ba— his sobriquet as an oddjob man—thus came to know his fair share of ports of call around the wider world: here in Algeria, there in Lisbon, and again in Senegal, the Congo, Réunion, Egypt, Mexico, and Madagascar. He practiced his scrappy French with soldiers while bartering coffee for books, and had discovered, thanks to this trade, that there were decent Frenchmen, too. He had wandered down Marseille streets, under a heavy sun, ten sous in his pocket: tramways rolling by like so many houses on wheels, the misery of a conquering country, “Monsieur” they called him in Canebière bars—yes, him, really, the indigène.

And so here he is, after Boston and New York and Le Havre, after so many years spent as if spanning the pages of Cendrars or Istrati; here he is, the former engineman, street hawker, street sweeper, going in circles in a small bedroom on rue de Charonne.

One can still find pictures of this street from that time. You studied them to imagine the “proud and gaunt figure,” as was said of him, “as thin as a shadow and always carrying a book,” flanked by a horse carriage and kids in berets. You want to see him treading on cobblestones, and stick him awkwardly in there, this character, this cardboard cut-out, makeshift and theatrical, by the podgy woman or the carpenter. In La Revue prolétarienne, the emigrant was depicted as small and frail—if quite tall for an Asian man, according to another source—his face emaciated, eyes at once soft and marked by fire. (That last detail you’ve had your fill of: his eyes—“sharp,” “feverish,” “brilliant,” “blazing”—seem to have made quite an impression on those he crossed paths with.)

You give every appearance of searching for that lost, inconsequential room, but it is History, boisterously capitalized, which imposes itself on you as you make your way. There’s the Charonne station, of course: where in 1962 nine protesters were murdered by the police and the admiring complicity of one Prime Minister Debré—beat up, bludgeoned, choked for wanting peace in Algeria. Farther away, number 92, you stop for a moment in front of the café La Belle Équipe, where, during a recent but already memorialized winter, two theocrats gunned down twice that number with .30 caliber rounds, cheering for God and Syria. One of them was the age Nguyên had been when he walked this same street in 1918. Even farther, at number 80, the memory takes shape—mingling smoke, blood, cobblestones, and Chassepots—of a barricade raised by the Commune against soldiers of the Republic, wretched Third of its name.

On a construction site, thick blue gloves stick out of a bag filled with sand and rubble; at nearby tables, customers sip sparkling water through their straws.

* * *

Nguyên moved out.

We don’t know the street, only that it is located, should we keep listening to the typesetter, on the left bank of the Seine, somewhere within the 13th arrondissement’s seven square kilometers. Cramped lodgings shared with a Tunisian man by the name of Moktar, an anticolonial militant who worked at an ordnance factory.

Nguyên’s documents weren’t in order; he steered clear of neighbors, hiding between his four walls for fear of running into law enforcement. These first few weeks, he wouldn’t turn on the light or touch the stove in the absence of his comrade, who, upon his return from drudgery, would prepare Nguyên’s meals for the next day. The apartment was humid, walls wept, wind blew between doors and windows. The typesetter would stop by and read the day’s headlines to him; they played cards, then drank wine when night fell—white? red? no matter—until the Tunisian returned.

Nguyên Tât Thanh’s face was gaunt, his complexion sallow, his eyes literally jumped out at you—or so the typesetter would record many years later. Again those eyes. Unusual mettle. The ascetic’s bewitching fervor. His interlocutor would recall telling himself that this stray of a man was destined to go far.

The SFIO—which Nguyên joined at the end of 1918, or maybe at the start of the following year, none can agree—had verified his identity and was committed to providing him with documents. One of its members, by the name of Paul Vaillant-Couturier, had in fact tasked our typesetter with assisting the young emigrant. Vaillant-Couturier wasn’t even thirty years old; a bit of a poet, a bit of a painter, in the fighting he’d been injured twice, with shrapnel in his hip as an infantryman, and then aboard a tank, with poison gas. The war left him without these Heavens to which he tried to hang on, still, so as not to grab life as it unfortunately is, crude, all too coarse; up there, there’s only nitrogen, argon, neon, or methane—no need to throw more. A pacifist, Vaillant-Couturier at the time wrote for the pages of the satirical Canard enchaîné; he was soon to become a socialist deputy in parliament, then a communist militant, and would feature, half-turning aside, with his dark, supple hair, next to a Nguyên in black tie and white collar, in one of the rare pictures of him taken during this period.

But the Annamite would soon leave this makeshift home.

* * *

A PMU, an African restaurant, secondhand and record stores (jazz, Caribbean, funk), a health promotion center (which you remember visiting some time ago) and posters on streetlamps for some candidate or other, three “agents for urban cleanliness,” four men bent over sewing machines in a fabric shop (wax, bazin, java), a grocery (plantains, fried cod, cassava leaves) and a shopping cart padlocked to a sidewalk barrier, a picture of Lili Brik (you remember Mayakovsky’s bedroom, of course: her lover of a poet who, you can’t recall the exact date, sent a bullet through his own heart, apartment 12, his farewell letter linking everyday life to the image of a small, smashed boat; you’d seen it a long time ago: it snowed upon Moscow’s rooftops and the wreckage of your love) and then a placard resting against a tree, on which one can read, in purple ink: Animals Deserve To Live Free & Not Exploited.

You go up rue Marcadet, two kilometers long, heart of the 18th arrondissement—the capital’s north, a good hour’s walk from Charonne. Ten or so documents in four different languages attest to his next lodging: a bedsit, a cubbyhole, a poorly furnished room. If none of them can help find its exact address, or even agree on the exact year of his move, two at least prove to be somewhat precise; one dates from the end of the 1960s, the other from the early 1990s. Nguyên lived “within sight” or “not far” from the Marcadet metro station, known today as Marcadet-Poissonniers, boasting five access points shared among three major thoroughfares . . . In his time, the two names were separate, and the Marcadet metro entrances were located on boulevard Barbès. Everything leads you to believe that Nguyên’s room was in the first third of the street you’re now pacing. This bedsitter he shared with Annamite anarchists, or so claims a source, then president of the ORTF.

Idle and lively people, onlookers and hands compelled into hurry by wage-labor; two thirtysomethings jog and a restaurant sign flickers; wheels toing and froing; the city growls, fawn gray, while the gutter scoffs down water. The metro opens its big mouth—you wouldn’t be against seeing some of Giono’s wild boars emerge from it, the dream of a Paris pulverized by sprouting trees. A man walks, beanie dragged over his skull, struggling with the weight of his life and of his suitcase; another carries an ancient armchair on his shoulders, legs to the sky, alongside someone who seems to be his partner. This specter you’re chasing around follows that of Rodin, half a century later: the artist had settled in the area next to a certain Rose, a working woman he swore was as beautiful as a statue.

About halfway up, silence falls suddenly and a molting takes place: the popular street adjusts its clothes and, just like the seated child you see through a barbershop window, has its nape swept by a shaving brush. Balsamic vinegar glaze snakes its way down white plates; here, the passerby can acquire “vintage” decorative objects, as well as “artisanal” cheeses and furniture. You make a stop at 129, at which address Alain Geismar, then a militant in the Proletarian Left, paid tribute to Maoist worker Pierre Overney, felled, some three years after the death of Hô Chi Minh, by a security officer at the Renault company; the murderer would be bumped off five years later by the Armed Nuclei for Popular Autonomy, while the militant eventually conformed to orthodox expectations. A woman in formless gray is at a standstill, on the phone, while another passes by, wrapped in a scarf the same orange as her shopping cart. A small truck is waiting, engine on in the chilly air, and you think, God knows why, of a description sketched out by one of Hô Chi Minh’s biographers, and based on a Parisian picture of Nguyên Tât Thanh—extremely rare, as you said before: the young man wore a bowler hat and had an expression not unlike that of the Little Tramp in The Immigrant or The Pilgrim. He seemed “lost,” “broken”; he didn’t have the grotesque look of the sentences you underlined in a Party publication, put out by Hanoi Editions: Marx’s heir, a “genius” whose work will establish “Spring eternal.”

Hang on.

It’s that you quite like this picture. You don’t know much about the Tramp, meaning, like everyone else, a few famous images, something vague about world heritage, a vagrant and his toothbrush mustache. But there’s more to say. For one, there’s that fresco on a wall in Dreux you passed by at random: an unhappy Tramp sitting, arms crossed, next to a small white dog with a black left eye. You stopped in your tracks and took a photo. And then there’s Ulysses, by Fondane. Long, flowing poems you gladly make your own, these verses unbridled by rhyme, the soul of harbors; you were always going to like that text. You read it multiple times, in two versions, one of which was published in Belgium in 1933, the other in 1944, the year of his demise at Auschwitz. In its words, from part nine: “Later, when I saw Chaplin I understood those emigrants, / later, much later myself . . . / [. . .] I ask no more for the meaning of the world / I pound my fist on the table of the world.” Thus a dog and his human brother, thus a poet. You know it doesn’t make much sense, but you like the image. Doubtless, the unruly poet and the rough sleeper, in a frock coat from A Dog’s Life, are suddenly linked, overlaid by an author’s imagination and then your own. Maybe this is how rectitude and tenderness meet, a dubious mixture that struggles, we know, to impart the true measure of revolutions. But here these two things are mixed with others you knew nothing about, catching up to your daydream. First, there’s this meeting that no one seems in a position to confirm: Nguyen Tât Thanh may have made the great actor’s acquaintance on the high seas, some time prior to his arrival in Paris—and so according to an account by Chaplin’s daughter published in the Cuban press. The Vietnamese man asked for his autograph, aboard a ship of some sort, before they shared a conversation in the kitchens. And then there’s this veteran of the Battle of Alsace acquainted with him, who noted that he had “something Chaplinesque about him,” something sad and comical at the same time. And also this sentence unearthed in a copious English-language biography: In 1946, then newly elected president Hô Chi Minh revealed to a reporter, in front of a crowd gathered for his visit to the Champs-Élysées, that he thought it quite normal that everyone would want to see—in your translation—“a Vietnamese version of Charlie Chaplin.” And so the cold-blooded insurgent and the funny-looking fellow, leader despite himself brandishing the flag of Modern Times, have full leave to stroll, together, the very street you’re walking on…

A bistro and a tent appear at the next intersection, the latter housing three homeless people; farther on, the same number of men, work uniforms speckled with mud, are cleaning the road with water jets and brooms, a few paces from a “sustainable” kitchen supplies shop. An “Abolition de la société de classe” poster, half-torn, colors one of the nearby walls: Paris seems a hundred years older and yet, more than ever, those words wait for their time. You pass by a home for young working women (now mixed-sex), a hypnotherapist and “life coach” practice, and a mother asking her son whether he plans on taking his violin. Four adolescents are singing, their football kicked on ahead of them along the sidewalk; a garbage bin spits out leaves; a jeweler offers “chic and natural” items which, of course, “defy trends”; a graffiti, partly covered, exclaims joyfully, We Don’t Know It Yet But We Are Anarchists!

Rue Marcadet ends here, at Guy-Môquet station. Of the rebel with the round hat and burning eyes who apparently read Dickens, Tolstoy, and Romain Rolland, nothing but air.

You order a coffee at the bar in front of you; sugar; take a pocket-sized book of Lebanese photography out of your parka, recently given by a friend with whom you traveled in Vietnam from south to north; leaf through it. Punctured facades, dented cars, automatic rifles, thick smoke, the rubbles of a brothel—“An end-of-the-world atmosphere reigned in this abandoned city.”