I was hungry. For the first time in months, I woke thinking of something other than Axelle. I was ravenous. Not wanting to wake Madame, I walked softly on the balls of my feet to the kitchen and poured milk into a bowl, and sat at the table with the milk and a triangle of hard cheese and a hunk of bread. I dipped the bread into the milk and broke off crumbs of cheese with my fingers and savoured every bite. When I was finished, I went into the salon and pulled the drapes back from the windows. The geraniums in their boxes were bursting pink and red. I pulled open the windows to the fresh morning air and leaned out to pinch off the old brown, gnarled leaves from woody stalks, making way for new blossom. This left my fingers sticky and smelling of bitter nut.

I’d never seen the sea. To live by it, I thought, that morning, could be something.

I dressed and put on my spring hat, a soft, white woven hat with a wide brim, fastened with a water lily I’d sewn myself. I told Madame I’d be gone less than an hour. In my pocket, just the right amount of money to purchase food for the day. I went to a certain charcuterie, and a particular boulangerie, where I could get cold, cooked meats and bread for a little less than what I usually paid, leaving me with enough money to buy daffodils. I wanted something yellow, something bright.

The flower vendors in the Place de la Bastille were loud and competitive. Mostly women, women in comfortable skirts and wide-armed, cotton blouses, displaying their goods in large woven baskets on the ground, or flat baskets in their arms, or big-wheeled barrows. They were no-nonsense and jolly and wore their hair tied loosely on top of their heads, fuzzy locks around their ears, cheeks rough and rosy.

At least, those were the women I noticed that day. They wouldn’t all have been no-nonsense. They wouldn’t all have been jolly.

The flowers and plants were artfully choreographed. White lilies spraying like fountains, bleeding nasturtiums, delicate white daisies and stiff hyacinths not yet blooming. Everything spilling to the ground, baby’s breath and fern and feathered plumes of conifer stems. Underfoot, a carpet of cuttings and discarded fronds and cartwheeling petals.

I walked the gamut of sellers, each daring me to buy, until I found the freshest daffodils, their heads still swaddled tightly in their husks. I bought ten, wrapped in brown, waxy paper. Water from the stems seeped through the paper and dripped on to my skirt as I walked, and I imagined the daffodils opening in the vase on my bedside table like the horn section of an orchestra. I almost felt happy.

And, queerly, the perfume of flowers, the earthy smells of dirt and roughage, made me want to fill my mouth with dirt, to feel the grit of it in my teeth and along the plane of my tongue.