‘The story is all I have.’

‘Then you must learn to believe it,’ he said, and stretched out both arms to me, creating with his hands a bowl into which, I understood, should be placed a few sous. I had spent the last of the money on the daffodils. I looked through my basket for an apple, a roll of bread, anything, and offered him a wedge of soft cheese wrapped tightly in paper. ‘I have nothing else to give.’

His face darkened.

‘I’m terribly sorry.’

He spat on the ground next to the hem of my skirt and his spit was pearly with phlegm. ‘Pute,’ he said, spitting again. Some of it landed on his chin and this made me retch. He rotated his platform and, as he rolled away, gathering speed, he called again over his shoulder, ‘Putain!’ Everyone in the passage stared.

I pulled my hat over my eyes and quickly retreated; the end of the passage seeming a mile away. The daffodils. I left them in the dirt. It had been a ridiculous idea to buy them in the first place, with money that wasn’t mine to spend.

I did not want to go back to Madame Debord’s apartment, believing that if I walked far enough and fast enough, I could leave shame behind. And so I walked without direction and was soon crossing the river at the Pont de l’Alma, where I descended the stairs to the riverbank and continued east. Mounted on the side of the next bridge, the Pont des Invalides, was a stone carving of a woman’s face. I had passed this bridge before but this was the first time I noticed her, and, oh. She was cruel. Her face sculpted in ashy-grey stone, protruding from a coat of arms that was covered in amphibious scales. White streaks of bird shit ran down her cheeks, and the creases of her features were blackened with mould. Wavy hair, parted down the middle of her head, framed a look that was seething. Her mouth was a black gash, forced open by some silent lament. I imagined, though, that I could hear her, and the sound was mournful, unchanging in pitch and volume. It carried all the weight of the bridge and the people passing over it, and it carried the darkness in their hearts, too.

A bunch of yellow daffodils. Pah.