He walked back across the courtyard to the kitchenette and brewed another pot of coffee, ripped more bread from the loaf. He sat on a sunny bench in the courtyard and stretched out his legs, crossing his boots over the cobbles. He dipped the bread into his coffee and lit his pipe, while in the workshop, the mask was setting beautifully. A whole century was coming to an end, and there would not be many more days as mild and satisfying as this one.

After a few hours and the completion of some of his other, more mundane tasks, the young mouleur deemed it time to separate the mask from the mould. The old man had moved off somewhere for a smoke or a sleep in the sun, and so the workshop was empty. How the mouleur wished for an audience. Even the dog was nowhere to be found, nor the simple-minded girl and her broom, nor any of the other artisans. So he set about his work silently, first unclamping the two halves of the mould. With hammer and chisel, he carefully broke the back seal along the top edges, then gently prised each half of the mould, one at a time, away from the mask.

And there it was. I. Balanced in the young mouleur’s chalky, work-rough hands. Not I. Nothing to do with me.

His pride was fit to pop the buttons from his shirt. And the mask was impressive. Smooth and detailed, nuanced, blemish-free. So lifelike, in fact, that decades later, people who knew about this sort of thing would be sceptical about whether or not I had been dead when the cast was taken. They were adamant that, if indeed dead, I couldn’t have drowned. Drowning victims were never discovered right away. Drowning victims sank like rocks. And they didn’t rise to the surface again until enough gases had built up in their rotting bodies to render them buoyant. This was not the face of someone who had spent days or weeks submerged, drifting along the silt and mud of the river bottom, swelling, peeling, feeding fish and crustaceans.

The young mouleur clamped the mould together again and laid it back in its crate, and propped the mask against the crate so that anyone who came into the room might stop to admire it. Soon after, the old man walked in, glanced at the mask but said nothing, and instructed the young mouleur to pack up the statuettes in preparation for delivery to the artist’s studio, where they would be polished and painted.

I attracted a lot of attention in the morgue. Too pretty to be dead, people said. There had to be some scandal. By the end of the first day, Laurent Tardieu had to concede his plans to sell my body to a laboratory. The gendarmes had shown some interest, and they demanded I stay on the slab for as long as possible. The price, literally for my head, would not be worth the trouble.