I felt nervous, all the time. All the time.

One morning, late March, I sat on a park bench and stared at the twiggy black branches of a dwarfish tree. Small silver-green buds, still packed solid as stones, protruded from the tree’s multitude of tough little knuckles. One shrivelled, yellow leaf clung to the tip of a branch, and I watched this leaf for a very long time. The wind blew and the leaf danced in a shifty, awkward way, yet still it held on, as it had done throughout the winter. Unperturbed by the new year’s growth. My body was pulling itself inwards, wrapping itself into a dense nut, and I did not interpret the leaf as some sign that I should persevere. It meant nothing.

On a busy street in Montparnasse (it might have been that same day or it might have been another), I saw a different man selling those mechanical toys made of painted tin. As before, onlookers watched the toys meander and jerk pointlessly around his feet. They looked like a horde of gargantuan, nocturnal insects that had been taken against their will from under a rock and were now blindly trying to find their way home. I thought of the man with his magnified eye in Deyrolle’s, impaling butterflies with straight pins. I thought of Axelle.

The air in the street was smoky and full of the steam of horses, and I became distracted by a wedding party passing by. The bride, if she was the bride – it was difficult to tell – looked young and unprepared. People shouted salutations. One man drank freely from a jug of wine and offered it to a young boy. There was a gentle prodding on the toe of my boot and I looked down to find one of the toys bumping up against my foot, trying to mount it. The toy, at first glance, looked like a man and woman copulating, but of course it wasn’t. This was a plaything composed of two acrobats locked hands-to-feet in a perpetual somersault.

This, too, meant nothing.

Nor did the ricochet sound of a woman beating a rug with a broom on a second-floor balcony mean anything.

Nor did the church entrance that swayed with black funeral drapery mean anything.

Nor did the wooden lasts hanging in the cobbler’s window, like pigs’ trotters, mean anything.

There was something else my Tante Huguette told me about my mother.

I was fifteen years old when, undressing for bed one evening, in winter, I discovered my first blood. This was long after the death of my grandmother, so it was to Tante Huguette that I brought my stained bloomers. Put up with one of her headaches, which made her as mean and dangerous as hot iron, she was sitting in a chair in front of the hearth with a blanket over her knees and her knuckles shining around a glass of brandy. Her chin was tucked into the ruffle of her collar as if she were sheltering from an icy wind. The room was nervous with fire shadow.