Letters from the Cafés

On a riverside stall you buy a worn 1953 book of poems. Tucked inside: café napkins, a dried violet flower, and notes in two different hands. They belonged to a novelist and a poet who spent thirty years in the cafés of Saint-Germain passing each other secret messages, and never once said the words out loud. 

Follow their trail from Saint-Sulpice to the Pont des Arts, read the notes they left across the quarter, and put together the one letter he never dared to send.