‘Have you heard about the models?’ she asked. ‘The girls who work for the clothing designers?’

We hadn’t.

‘You can find a position at one of the couture houses,’ she said in a near whisper, leaning closer, protective of this information, ‘where your only task is to wear expensive garments all day and parade in front of women who have more money than sense, tempting them to buy what you’re wearing. You have to make them believe that they will look as beautiful as you do, even if they’re ugly. You have to make them imagine what their lives could be so you twirl around, or sit in a chair by a window and pretend to write a letter, or, if you’re modelling an evening gown, you stand next to a painting or a bust or some other ornament and sip a glass of water that has been coloured to look like wine. You’re selling more than just the clothing, you see. It’s an act,’ she said, turning to Madame, ‘but it pays very well.’

‘It would be a far superior act if they permitted you to drink real wine,’ said Madame Debord.

‘How strange to be regarded in that way,’ I said. ‘To be observed. As an object in a dress. You’re far bolder than I.’

‘People have been observing me my whole life,’ said Axelle.

The waiter came back then, carrying the bill on a small silver tray. Madame scrutinized it from bottom to top and quibbled over an unexplained five-centime charge.

‘La caissière,’ said the waiter, ‘is new. I apologize.’ He took the bill away and returned a few moments later with a corrected version.

‘You’ve got to be on top of them,’ Madame said, loudly enough for his benefit, while she pinched coins out of her purse.

‘Madame, do you trust no one?’ Axelle asked.

‘No one,’ said Madame.

The following Saturday, I went alone to meet Axelle in the same part of the city, this time to visit a place that she had kept secret, but promised would be like nothing I’d seen before. We met in front of a confectioner’s on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and walked towards Rue du Bac, stopping on a corner to watch a man who was selling mechanical tin toys. He stood just in the alcove of a large wooden door, its central brass knob like the eye of a Cyclops, and at his feet, a circus of wind-up toys. Monkeys playing the drums, waddling ducks and a somersaulting clown – each of its swinging parts being slowly pulled over by its own momentum. The automatons, a dozen of them at least, ambled sleepily about the cheapjack’s feet, bumping into each other and into the stone walls of the doorway. When one strayed too far, he would pick it up gently, turn it the right way around, and place it back on the pavement.

‘How much?’ one onlooker asked.

‘Twenty-five sous,’ the cheapjack answered insouciantly, as if sale or no sale were nothing to him.