Austerlitz continues that, when he first lived in Paris as a student at the end of the 1950s, he devoted himself entirely to his studies—a devotion that became a lifelong habit. He tells the narrator about that time:

Every day, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, he follows the footnotes of the books he read to other footnotes, in an endless chain of research that reveals many obscure facts. Austerlitz eventually sees a short film about the library called Toute la mémoire du monde (All the World’s Memories), which includes a scene of messages traveling through the library via a system of pneumatic tubes. This scene reveals both the nature of the library and the function of Austerlitz’s and the other scholars’ daily work: “the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn” (276).

One day in the library, Marie de Verneuil (then a stranger to Austerlitz) notices Austerlitz’s despondency and invites him to coffee. They talk about their shared interest in architectural history. Marie tells Austerlitz about her visit to an enormous paper mill built on a bend of a deep, green river in Charente.