The morgue was located at the south-eastern tip of the Île de la Cité, and was like most other administrative buildings in Paris: a stone box fronted by Grecian pillars, mansard roof, a facade screaming post-revolutionary idealism engraved with the words: Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! The building backed on to the river, its stone wall almost flush with the bank, where the bodies of the drowned – and there were many – could be delivered by boat.

This wasn’t the city’s first morgue. The original, a stinking black hole dug underneath Le Châtelet, the prison, was nothing more than a cadaver dump. Deceased prisoners were shunted down that hole but also Paris’s anonymous dead; men and women like I had been, pulled by their shirt collars from the river, or loners from the streets, or lost children. More murdered than not. Scores of suicides. The dead were piled like bricks on the floor, uncovered. It was a place you would go if someone in your life had disappeared and you hoped (or hoped not) to find her there, in the pestilent fug, with only the oily flicker of the warden’s lantern to guide you.

When the prison was demolished, the medical inspector insisted on a new morgue that would be much improved upon the old, including better light, ventilation, cooling systems and a salle publique more suitable for viewing, separated from the dead by a wall of glass.

I was delivered to the morgue in the purple smog of early morning. My arrival was one insignificant and regular detail out of a million details in a city waking up for another day. A gang of workers was crossing the Pont de la Tournelle, shovels slung over strong, bent shoulders. Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys and street by street, alley by alley, people living on top of one another were swinging their legs out of bed, their feet landing on cold, waxed floors. Boiling water for coffee or standing in front of shaving mirrors or darning stockings that they hadn’t had time to repair the day before.

Towering over the morgue there was of course Notre-Dame, white birds circling and screaming around its spire.

Mine was the only body to be delivered to the morgue that day. I was received by the pathologist on duty, Laurent Tardieu, a man who daily wore a fragrant sprig of dried lavender (tied tightly and sent in batches by his sister, who lived in his native Provence) in the buttonhole of his jacket to help ward off the stench of death. The lavender was no match for the fumes in which Laurent Tardieu worked – an odour like syrupy fruit from the fresh corpses, like rotting fish from the overripe ones – but all the same, he wore it.

Laurent Tardieu laid me out on a marble slab in the examination room and, as a formality, felt for my pulse with the pad of his middle finger pressed against the inside of my wrist. He listened for my heart through a small brass stethoscope shaped like a trumpet. After officially confirming my death, he logged my arrival into the morgue records, which were reviewed regularly by the gendarmes. He then peeled off what remained of my outer clothing. My linen petticoat and skirt, my blouse and cardigan. My stockings. He was not surprised that I wore no boots, and assumed that they had been left by the riverbank. (Later that morning they would be found, where I’d left them with my coat, by a young bookbinder, and taken home to his sister. She would, in turn, pass the boots on to a friend and get great use out of the coat for many years after.)