And then. Axelle. She appeared at the glass like a beautiful, rare fish in a tank. She wore the same coat she had been wearing the last time I saw her, and the same hat with the lilac ribbon. Standing beside her, a woman I didn’t know. This woman, pretty in the typical way, was one of the other girls who modelled the dresses for rich women. Axelle and her typically pretty friend both looked bored. My love saw my body but she did not see me, and so I. Remained unidentified.

The Mouleur Statuaire was located on the Left Bank along Quai Saint-Bernard, not a long walk from the morgue. The day was sunny and crisp. The sky was a brilliant, boundless blue and the leaves on the plane trees bright yellow and chattering like canaries. The young mouleur was grateful to be walking in such fine weather, but he was eager to get back to the atelier to show off the best cast he had ever taken.

The premises were made up of a collection of small stone buildings set around a central cobbled courtyard. Headless, unfinished plaster statues, moulds for statues and cornicing, plinths, rosettes and garden tools were all stacked together against the walls that lined the yard. Everything was coated in yellowish powder, including a three-legged mutt who spent most of his time asleep under an outdoor table.

First for the mouleur, a bowl of coffee and a fist of crusty bread ripped from a loaf in the kitchenette. Dropping a trail of crumbs and slopping coffee across the floor as he walked and ate, he gestured, with a lift of his eyebrows, a half-hearted apology to the simple-minded girl who stood by the door with her broom, clearly put out but too feeble to say so. He went back through the courtyard, dipping his bread in the coffee and sidestepping a mob of cantankerous chickens, and into the main workshop. Inside, the walls and every surface, every tool, encrusted with powder. A long, waist-high workbench ran the length of the room, and at this bench a senior mouleur was bent to his work, wearing a stiff leather apron. His bald, liver-spotted head bobbed over a series of statuettes of some saint. On the table in front of him, a small hammer and set of chisels, speckled with dried plaster. Tools also hung from nails on the walls, and shelves that looked ready to fall were stacked with moulds and mixing bowls, sacks of pulverized lime and gypsum, broken chunks of statues and masks. On the back wall hung masks of the dead, mostly people unknown, the death masks having been commissioned by their families, but also a few notable poets, painters and long-dead members of the aristocracy. In the centre of the wall loomed the long and narrow face of Napoleon, his countenance sombre and authoritative, even in death.