The Watchtower

toward the park with their sketchbooks right away. It was full daylight, after all. And I’d be better off resting now so I could be more alert tonight.
    I checked in and was shown to a pretty toile-papered room overlooking the town square and the high walls of the château. The square was full of outdoor cafés, a carousel, and a stage being set up for some kind of evening theatrics. The bright, colorful scene full of tourists and day-trippers from Paris belied any dark activity behind the high walls. I’d imagined coming to Fontainebleau that I’d be plunged into a dark, trackless wilderness, not this bucolic scene as peaceful and harmless as the shepherds and shepherdesses frolicking across the tame toile landscape on the wall. I fell asleep lulled by the music of the carousel and the plump, smiling faces on the wallpaper.
    My dreams started peaceful enough as well. I was in a green meadow. I could hear the bleat of sheep in the distance and the sound of bells. I walked to the top of a hill and looked down on a valley dotted with quaint stone cottages and hedgerows. A giggling girl ran past me, her frilled petticoats frothing around her plump legs. A boy in striped trousers and loose shirt pursued her. A couple of sheep frolicked nearby. I walked a little farther on and another girl ran past me, also in frilly dress and low-cut bodice, and yet again a boy in peasant attire followed her, along with the same retinue of sheep. I had an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu. When the scene repeated a third time, I spun around, annoyed that I seemed to be stuck in a repeating loop … and then I saw that the same scene—running shepherdess, following shepherd, bleating sheep—was repeated over and over again across the valley. I was stuck in the toile wallpaper; no matter how far I wandered, I kept encountering the same banal scene. I trudged on, looking desperately for a way out, but somehow knowing that I’d be stuck there forever.
    I awoke in my room at the Aigle Noir, my heart pounding. The now maddening drone of the carousel and the voices of people in the square filled the room. In my confused half-asleep state I imagined the voices came from the figures in the wallpaper. The raucous laughter was from the leering shepherds—had they looked quite so lecherous before my nap?—the high-pitched squeals from the fleeing shepherdesses—had they looked quite so fearful before? But what was making those bleating sounds? They weren’t just in my dream—they were here in Fontainebleau.
    I got up and went to the window. My first surprise was that it was full dark. The clock on the night table read 22:33—ten thirty-three, my sleep-addled brain deduced after a sluggish moment. I’d slept for over ten hours.
    Ten hours stuck in that maddening wallpaper. No wonder I felt tired!
    My second surprise was that I had apparently been transported to seventeenth-century France. Specifically a seventeenth-century performance of the Comédie-Italienne. The square was full of masked people dressed in elaborate costumes. I recognized the whitened face and loose white blouse and pantaloons of Pierrot, the tattered dress, heavy eye makeup and tambourine of Columbine, and the diamond-patterned costume and black-and-red mask of Harlequin. The actors were circulating among the crowd, drumming up enthusiasm for the coming performance, no doubt.
    There was nothing sinister in that, I assured myself as I got dressed and went downstairs. I had time for a quick bite in a café before heading off for my meeting. I picked an outside table so I could watch the theatrics. There were jugglers and flame-eaters and a man in an owl mask doing magic tricks, but the main narrative thread consisted of the love triangle between Harlequin, Pierrot, and Columbine. Pierrot was forever mooning, his white face a perfect doleful moon, for his beloved, but whenever he seemed about to realize his dream of winning her, Harlequin would devise some way of keeping them apart. Then he would sweep in himself and whisk Columbine away in his arms.
    “Poor Pierrot,” I heard someone say in English. “He never wins.”
    I turned around and saw Sarah with her friends Carrie and Becca at a table behind me. They waved for me to join them and I went over to their table for a coffee and to see the sketches they’d done of the château and gardens. Their happy, sunburned faces and full sketchbooks left me feeling like a mole rat for sleeping the day away, but I enjoyed