On my way home, in the shelter of a passage, its glass roof darkened by dust and muck, I saw someone I recognized, the legless man from the Gare de Lyon. He was begging at the outdoor tables of a restaurant. I stopped to watch him, considering whose lot was worse, his or mine. He caught me spying and palmed his way slowly towards me. His movements, they were slow, soporific. I could have stood in that spot for a hundred years watching him approach while everything else in the world flowed around us, we two pieces of flotsam. As he drew close, I recognized the awkward hang of his lip, his contorted mouth. He smiled.

‘Monsieur,’ I said, my voice high and silly with complicity. ‘Comment allez-vous?’ I thought he might confide in me some precious, private thing. But from the look on his face it was evident he didn’t remember me at all.

‘What could be so terrible, Mademoiselle, from way up there?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Your sadness is palpable,’ he said, with great difficulty. ‘Perhaps Mademoiselle is weighed down by her condition?’ He directed his gaze just below the waistline of my skirt.

I knelt to him as I had before, though my balance was off and I nearly tumbled on to my backside. I laid the daffodils by my knees and steadied myself with my palms on the ground, and a woman passing in a red velvet hat looked down her nose at me and frowned. Thin peacock feathers pranced from where they were fastened at the top of the hat, an indictment. And then she and her hat were gone.

‘You would be amazed at what can be seen from my perspective, Mademoiselle,’ he said, drawing out his final syllable like taffy.

‘Monsieur is bold to address a stranger with such familiarity.’

‘But here you are, on your knees. Quite familiar.’

‘You don’t remember me,’ I said. ‘We met, a year ago, in the train station.’

His eyes fluttered and he pressed one dirty finger to his lips. ‘I meet a lot of strays.’

‘I had a husband. He died,’ I said, shuffling my feet. My toes were going numb and my knees were close to buckling. ‘He had a sickness in his heart.’

‘Son coeur. En effet.’ Indeed.

‘He had a condition.’

The legless man closed his eyes, very slowly, then opened them again. ‘You’re not in mourning dress.’

I raised my eyes towards the brim of my hat.

‘You ought to get yourself some black muslin,’ he said, as evenly as he could. ‘And a wedding band.’

What a fool I was. My mouth went dry and my ankles ached. I stood up, dusted my hands on my skirt, then brushed the dirt away and smoothed the pleats with my palms.

The legless man watched me, closely. ‘Mustn’t be soiled,’ he slurred. With one filthy hand, he pulled at a thick forelock of greasy hair and tucked it elegantly behind his ear, then smoothed it with two fingers until it shone like metal. ‘Your story needs work,’ he said.