He cushioned the mould with hay in a wooden crate and covered the top of the crate with an ill-fitting lid, then packed his tools into a leather sack. He carried everything outside, joined by Laurent Tardieu, and set the crate on the pavement where people were already lining up for the viewing salon. Both men pinched tobacco from Laurent’s stash and lit their pipes, and watched as more people crossed the bridges from the left and right banks to join the queue. A pack of skinny, dirty boys came running and spinning one another like tops from the direction of the Pont de l’Archevêché. One of them hurdled the mouleur’s crate, knocking the lid askew and sending the crate skidding. Fists raised, the young mouleur yelled after him and was told, in so many words, to go fuck himself.

As the pipes were smoked down to ash, the mouleur tried to convince his uncle to join him for a coffee in his favourite cafe, not five minutes away on Rue Beautreillis, but Laurent Tardieu declined, deciding instead to ready my corpse for the day’s first viewing. The mouleur’s last words to his uncle as he heaved his bag of tools on to his back and collected his crate: ‘Do you ever rid yourself of the smell, Uncle?’

Laurent Tardieu’s wry answer: ‘What smell?’

Laurent returned to where he’d left me alone, stripped a few strands of plaster from my hair, and washed the skin that had been crusted with white when the cast was set. With the help of a porter, he moved me on to a wheeled gurney and covered the lower half of my body with a linen sheet. The clothes I had been wearing, still damp with the memory of the river, were laid gently across my legs. I was pushed down a long corridor and through a set of double doors into the viewing salon.

Two rows of six marble slabs, black marble, seven of them already occupied. Five men, two women. Low-hanging lamps over the bodies and also over each, ice-cold water dribbled from swan-necked faucets, an effort to slow the process of decay. On the back wall, their clothing hung from metal hooks, wilted and empty. Jackets, waistcoats, leather belts. Woollen cummerbunds, breeches and blouses and dresses and trousers – a form of identification to speak for bodies that had become distorted beyond obvious recognition.

Four of these people had been pulled from the river, the other three found alone on the streets. I was laid out next to a young man whose bloated body had been found butting up against the middle arch of the Viaduc d’Auteuil, the bridge that crossed the Seine at the fortification wall on the western edge of the city. This day would be his last in the viewing salon. His eyelids, lips and nose were gone, eaten by fish and crabs. The skin had come off his hands like gloves and his gut was bovine, stretched to its limit. His testicles had swollen to three times their normal size and his tongue, tumescent and grotesque, had forced its way through the opening of his lipless mouth, and hung, defeated, like a mouse dead in a trap. Inside, his organs were already putrefying, dissolving into soup. Later that day he would be buried in the cemetery beyond the fortification walls with all the other unclaimed, in a grave unmarked.