Madame had no visitors. No invitations. She owned no books but was a fool for the gossip and sensation of the newspapers and the serialized dramas of les feuilletons. When I asked her about the newspapers stacked around the apartment, she told me they were to be taken to the butcher and sold for five centimes a kilogram. Madame Debord didn’t need extra money, from what I could tell. Her husband had left her plenty and the partners in his firm faithfully sent her a small monthly dividend. But she was frugal, her clothes and furnishings years out of date. The apartment was in dire need of new wallpaper and paint. Or at least a good cleaning. When I suggested to her that maybe Audette, who lived with her mother in one of the small loft apartments, would do a good job at cleaning, she said Audette couldn’t be trusted with anything more valuable than a soiled chemise. So, without being asked, I performed some light cleaning as well. Under surveillance, naturally.

Despite Madame’s late, two-hour nap, which she took daily from 4 to 6 p.m., her bedtime was precisely nine-thirty. She asked only that I sit by her while she drank her warm brandy and fell asleep, which never took more than five or ten minutes. After that, the evenings were my own. I would turn down all the gas lamps in the salon and place a candle on the side table next to my favourite armchair, by the window. I would sit quietly. All day there was noise, either from the piano across the street or from a heated debate in the apartment above us. Always someone washing dishes, always feet on the stairs. From outside, the horse whip, the newspaper seller, someone hawking some new gadget one could not possibly live without. And laughter. People in Paris laughed endlessly. Not always mirthfully. But at night, in that narrow corner of the city, there was the hush that followed the end of noise, after the lamps were extinguished. I liked to stare out of the window at the darkness, the lack of light like a salve to my tired eyes. Sometimes I reread the day’s papers – mainly gossip, mainly grisly.

Twice a week I helped Madame Debord bathe. It turned out the water heater that I had been so excited about leaked gas and wasn’t safe to use, and Madame didn’t think it necessary to spend the money to fix it. So I had to heat her water the regular way, on the stove. I had helped my grandmother to bathe so this wasn’t new to me, but Madame hadn’t been looking after herself at all and the first time, it took me an hour of scrubbing to remove the dead skin from her elbows and feet, to remove a black, gummy matter that had collected in the creases under her breasts. I could take care of her hair myself, but I convinced her to call in a manicurist, at least just the once, for her finger- and toenails.