‘C’est morbide,’ said the mother, crossing herself. ‘I don’t want it here.’

‘There are no such things as favours,’ said the father.

‘I’ll keep it next to my bed,’ said one of the brothers.

‘I bet you will,’ said another.

‘I’m selling it,’ said the girl who swept.

Because when she had first seen it, she sensed an opportunity. She saw a face that would, with its laconic smile, transcend time and fact. Smooth as cream, a face on to which anyone could paint anything they wanted. It was pretty but not too pretty. Innocent but also wise. The girl who swept was a person whose instincts were sharp. She was someone who knew. The girl had toiled under rag and broom for years, looking up at the pale and the serious, the death masks of Napoleon, Dante, Voltaire, Goethe, etc., and here, finally, was somebody else who, to put it simply, knew.

The girl who swept used a wooden trolley, also pilfered from the mouleur statuaire (and which also closely resembled the wheeled platform used by that foul-mouthed vagabond with no legs), to transport the crate from model shop to model shop. At her first stop she told the keeper that the face depicted by the mask belonged to a poor, innocent shop girl who had fallen in love with a philandering rentier. The rentier, in turn, had assured her he had the connections necessary to catapult her dream career as a (and the girl who swept stumbled on this detail, as the story had taken an unexpected twist; she hadn’t understood until that moment the whimsical nature of story to spontaneously awaken in this way, to live and to breathe. She quickly settled on singer as there’d been a playbill advertising a concert plastered on the wall outside the model shop). The rentier, she continued, had the connections necessary to catapult her dream career as a singer. When the innocent girl fell too much in love, according to the girl who swept, the rentier bolted out of Paris like a whipped horse, leaving no forwarding address, and the heartsick songbird threw her wretched self into the river. The girl who swept didn’t think I would object to this fiction. She had seen it in my dead face: transcendence.

When asked the name of the innocent drowned woman, the girl replied that the incident had occurred several years before, and that the identity of the victim had been – another flourish of poetry here – lost, left at the bottom of the river. ‘All the more intrigue, Monsieur,’ she added, holding the mask aloft and stroking the waves of plaster hair lovingly with her rough, callused thumb.

With every shop she visited, the story was edited in small and unimportant ways. The dead woman was an orphan. Her lover an absinthe-addicted revolutionary. Or she was a model for a semi-famous painter; she was a Parisienne grisette. A milliner’s assistant. A seamstress. It didn’t matter. What mattered were the parts of the story that were unknowable. This, the girl knew, was the strongest selling point. This and the inarguable presence of the river, tumbling and spilling through the heart of the city, through the heart of the story. Rippler of breath. Catcher of light. Taker of lives.