‘I’ll give you twenty.’

‘Impossible, Monsieur,’ the cheapjack said, without looking up from his toys. He scooped up a duck that had stopped moving and from his pocket procured a key, which he turned in a hole in the duck’s back before setting it back on the ground. With a small pat to the head, he sent the toy on its way.

I loved this banter, this act, Madame would have called it, played out by two strangers who either didn’t know they were performing or didn’t care. Mocking frustration but clearly pleased, the onlooker took out a purse from his breast pocket, and paid the asking price for a bear that raised its arms again and again as if it were about to toss the red-and-white ball that balanced between its paws.

A few blocks down the Rue du Bac we came to our destination: Deyrolle’s, a taxidermist. Two floors of exotic animals and other curiosities. This was a place of high ceilings and large windows that let in the bright afternoon light. Creaky wooden floors and the dusty smell of talc. The narrow showrooms were full of people, of rustling skirts and the scuff of boots on worn wood, full of people quiet and awestruck at what they saw displayed on long tables and behind glass. Axelle had been correct; this place was indeed like nothing I’d seen before. This was time itself, seized, and I had been transported. There were animals I had heard of but never seen and hadn’t truly believed existed until now – all frozen in past-life’s pose. Their glass eyes stared into the future or they stared at nothing. The cheetah, pink flamingo, deer and leopard, each exhibit labelled in perfect black script on a small white card, the French and Latin names of the specimens and their places of origin. A snow-white peacock from India on a pedestal, its tail feathers falling to the ground. A blue-faced vulture from Chile, and a furry Australian possum perched on a gnarled fork of marbled wood. From the Americas, a beaver, a mink, a jackrabbit the size of a dog. There was a metallic-green hummingbird and a platypus. What an animal that was, the platypus, adapted to land and water both! There were rats as big as puppies, ostrich eggs cradled like jewels in nests of velvet, canaries of every colour imaginable. In one glass case, a bat, and next to it, the skeleton of a bat, its wing bones articulated like the veins of a leaf. I was enchanted. I paused to stare deeply into the pitch-black, perfectly round eyes of an owl. Axelle became enamoured with a tiny, white mouse no bigger than her thumb, its eyes glowing like little red coals. The larger animals – the enormous moose, the bear, the caribou, the kangaroo – were not behind glass and it was difficult to resist the urge to touch, to run my fingers through the coarse fur, or caress with my thumb the smooth tips of their hard, white teeth. I wanted to wrap my arms around the neck of the lioness, push my ear against her solid chest and listen to the beat of her heart.