She woke up perhaps two hours later with a hoarse cough, just after 6 p.m. I hadn’t been asleep, but I hadn’t been entirely awake either, and I sat forward with a start, opening my eyes to an unfamiliar room that had become cut with shadow by the obtuse light of a spring evening. I rose quickly and stumbled, knocking my shin on a footstool, and, comically, propelled myself through the vestibule to the first door in the hallway. I knocked lightly.

‘Audette?’ Madame called, her voice tight, like wind passing through a tunnel.

I opened the door and stood at the threshold. The blinds were closed and the room so dark that Madame would have only been able to see my silhouette. I considered pretending to be Audette (whom I assumed, correctly, was the laundry girl who had let me into the apartment) to save her a shock.

The rasp of her breathing, then, stuttered again, ‘Audette?’

I took a step into the room. ‘It’s me, Madame Debord,’ I said, and whispered my name.

Shuffling blankets. Another, weaker cough. A match was struck and a lamp next to the bed was lit and there she was, propped upright, half sunk into a large pillow on a canopied bed that was partially recessed into the wall. She’d pulled the blankets up and was clutching them under her chin, and a cap was perched on her high forehead. She was petite and had glinting eyes, like those of a field mouse or squirrel.

‘Did Audette let you in? Did you lock the door behind her?’

‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Shall I go and lock it now?’

‘Always lock the door,’ she said. ‘The family who live on the third floor are Russian, and they are thieves. I’m sure of it. And that concierge, Monsieur Muller. He can’t be trusted either. He holds back the post and he’s cheap. I’ve been at him to repair the wall in my kitchen for over a year but he refuses.’

‘He did look the type,’ I said.

Her hard eyes widened with the surprise, I thought, of someone who was accustomed to being pooh-poohed. She nodded curtly.

‘Will Madame take her coffee in bed?’ I asked, assuming this was what I was expected to ask.

‘Absolutely not,’ she said. ‘Lock the door, then come and help me dress and we’ll take our coffee in the salon.’

The girl who had been my predecessor was, apparently, also a thief. Madame Debord confessed that she had lied when she’d written in her letter that the girl’s position had been terminated because of a marriage proposal. In truth, I found out now, Madame had given her the sack because she’d been stealing. She didn’t want to alarm me, she explained, by writing about the duplicitous sorts of people I might encounter in Paris, so she’d lied. When she told me this, as we sipped coffee in the sitting room with a deck of cards on the table that never got dealt, with the sky darkening and my stomach rumbling and no mention of an evening meal, she did not apologize for the fiction.