- Chapter 19 opens with a long epigraph that's excerpted from Christabel LaMotte's poem The City of Is. In it, we see the opening scenes of the terrible flood that drowns the doomed city.
- Does the poem foreshadow some kind of cataclysm in LaMotte's life, or does it chime with Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey's journey across the English Channel? Read on and see.
- As the narrator brings us back to the story itself, we find Maud and Roland together in a cabin on a ship crossing the English Channel.
- Maud has stolen Ariane Le Minier's address and telephone number from Leonora Stern, and Ariane has agreed to meet with them in Nantes. They meet up with her in a Turkish restaurant, and Ariane surprises them with photocopies of a journal that Sabine de Kercoz kept during her cousin Christabel's visit in 1859–1860.
- Together, Roland and Maud drive out to Finistère and rent a hotel room for three days; then, they settle in to read Sabine de Kercoz's journal.
- The rest of Chapter 19 takes us directly into Sabine's journal.
- As we read through Sabine's journal entries, we learn about Christabel LaMotte's arrival in mid-September, 1859. As we see, Christabel was unusually weak and sick when she arrived, but slowly recovers her strength over the course of the next few weeks.
- At first, Sabine works hard to get Christabel to like her, and she's keen to get Christabel's perspective on her writing.
- After Christabel finally reads some of Sabine's stuff, she starts to treat her Breton cousin more nicely. It's clear that the two of them have a lot of literary tastes in common, if little else.
- In November, the Toussaint (All Saint's) season begins—a time for listening to stories together around the fireplace at night.
- Sabine records some of the stories that her father and their household servant, Gode, tell during the early days of November, and then she recounts an event that upset her.
- As Gode was telling a story one night, Sabine noticed that her father held Christabel's hand and kissed the top of her head.
- Sabine becomes convinced that her father and Christabel are falling in love, and she doesn't bother to hide her resentment.
- It isn't until Christmas Eve, nearly two months later, that Sabine realizes her mistake. At a church service with her father and Christabel, she notices Christabel holding her belly in a very peculiar way. Suddenly, Sabine realizes that Christabel is pregnant.
- Once she puts this together, Sabine realizes that her father isn't in love with Christabel: he's just showing her extra care and compassion because she's in such a pickle.
- Sabine tries to patch things up with her cousin, but Christabel is having none of it. She tells Sabine to take a hike and claims that she doesn't need her little cousin's help.
- Throughout the winter of 1860, Christabel refuses to discuss her pregnancy with anyone.
- At the end of April, Christabel disappears. When she returns a week later, she's no longer pregnant, and her child is nowhere to be seen. What's more, she refuses to tell anyone what happened to the child.
- The final journal entry is from May 10, 1860. In it, she records that Christabel received a letter from a man, but she doesn't know who he was or what the letter contained.
- That's all, folks.
- After that last journal entry, we see a note from Ariane Le Minier, who explains that this is where Sabine's journal ends.
- Ariane's letter also includes some poems "and parts of poems" (19.380) that she found with Sabine's papers, and because they're written in English, she thinks that they may have been written by Christabel LaMotte.
- The chapter ends with these "scraps of poems" (19.385), all of which seem to be describing the physical and psychological pains of bearing, and losing, a child.