It was two long weeks before I saw Axelle again. She came unannounced to Madame Debord’s apartment in the afternoon, while Madame was sleeping. Axelle had gone that day with some of the other girls from La Samaritaine to a very odd place, the city’s morgue, and she was desperate to tell me everything.

‘You have a fascination with death,’ I said.

‘I haven’t,’ she said. She sat primly on the edge of Madame’s sofa, having refused coffee or any other refreshments, and was pulling her gloves off, one finger at a time. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Our last outing was to the taxidermist. Now you’re touring the morgue.’

‘Oh, everyone goes to the morgue.’

‘Why would anyone want to see that?’

‘I don’t know. The entrance is free? And the show is. Well. You can’t look away.’

‘It seems intrusive.’

‘Some say it’s your civic duty to go. Bodies are found in this city all the time, especially in the river, and when no one knows who they are – who they were – their remains are exhibited in the morgue for anyone to see and, with luck, identify. But it’s a gruesome show. I had to go just to stop people asking me: have you been yet? Why haven’t you been?’

‘And? Was it worthwhile?’

‘I won’t soon forget it. The whole thing is like a carnival show. Outside on the street, in front of the building, there are hawkers selling all kinds of things, gingerbreads and apples, toys for children. I heard that once, a body was found in a chest, and on the day the chest was exhibited in the morgue, a hawker stood out front selling toy versions of the same. It’s ghastly.

‘You wouldn’t think there were dead people just on the other side of the doors. The queue was enormous and you cannot imagine how nervous I became, just from having to wait. When we got to the front, there was a wooden partition set across the doorway, which blocked our view of the interior, and from inside there was a current of very cool air, and an odour that was like face powder. I almost turned away but the girls, they were determined.’

‘Why?’

Axelle leaned towards me, whispering. ‘A few weeks ago, two babies were pulled from the river. Dead. An infant and a child of two. Everyone believes them to be sisters. Thousands of people have come to see them. Only last week someone identified them so they took the poor things off display and thawed them out – they freeze the bodies, so they don’t rot as quickly – they thawed them out and prepared them for burial. But then, a few days ago, someone else claimed the identification to be incorrect, that the children they’d been identified as were in fact alive and well and living with their mother in Chaillot. So the babes have been frozen again and put back on display.’

‘You really wanted to see this?’