deceitful letters (aragon)

I wanted to know if there still existed somewhere in his domain a bizarre institution which Paul Valery had once described to me: an agency where one could arrange to have letters mailed from any point of the globe to any given address, thus making it possible to fake a voyage to the Far East without straying even one inch from the Far West of some lawless escapade. I couldn’t uncover a clue: the concierge had never heard of any such place…. After all, what does a concierge know? And perhaps it’s been more than twenty years since Paul Valery has had occasion to use such deceit.

15, "The Passage de L’Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon