The temperature in the apartment was about ninety degrees. Although the old woman was forever fussing, and dusting, and brushing, it smelled. It smelled of mothballs, which Juliette had forgotten existed; it smelled of burnt cooking oil, and dust, and clothes that weren’t quite clean. Occasionally—she was beginning to suspect Mathilde might be incontinent—it smelled powerfully of urine. Then the old woman would disappear into one of the bathrooms for a long time, emerging fresher.

Juliette knew that even if the old woman fell, or called for help from that bathroom, she would find it very difficult to go to her aid. She pitied, but her skin crawled.

At seven she was off duty. Meanwhile, she couldn’t breathe, and she felt sick.

The old woman’s preparations for bed seemed endless. First there had been the meal, then some hot milk, then the bed in her room had to be turned down and a hot water bottle put in to warm the sheets. Then she prayed—on her knees, by the bed. Then she went into the room next to hers, that dreadful shrine to her beloved Maria, and insisted on turning that bed down, as if Maria were going to be sleeping there, as if she were waiting for a woman she knew to be dead.

That particular part of her nightly ritual had made Juliette shiver; she began to have a horrible feeling that she and the old woman were watched, that they were not alone here, that some revenant stealthily and silently approached.

She had backed out of the pink room fast as Mathilde began to light a series of votive night-lights under the photographs of Maria Cazarès. Their flames flickered. In their wavering light the walls and the pictures seemed to move. The bed, with its monstrous fat pink silk eiderdown, looked as if it might stir. Juliette, who would have said she did not believe in ghosts, sensed them now. She could feel presences in the corners of this room, the caress of a cold hand on her spine. She fled. Back in the sitting room, trembling, she smoked several cigarettes.

The old woman was washing now. Juliette listened to the noise of running water, the thrum of pipes. She tried not to watch the time. She stood in the middle of this room, with its mass of crowded furniture, trying not to see the crucifixes, the saints’ pictures, and the portrayals of Christ Above the mantelpiece there was a huge depiction of Him: greenish-pink; He was indicating a large hole in His heart region, within which burned a light.

Juliette averted her eyes. None of the windows would open. She wished she could leave. She even wished that English journalist—that quite extraordinarily handsome English journalist—would come back. Anything to get her out of this place. Another hour, she told herself; less. Then she could go home, have a bath, a large drink, and talk to her husband—if he was there, of course. They could talk about Stockholm, to which city her husband, a diplomat, was shortly to be posted. Only another month, Juliette thought, and she couldn’t wait to leave Paris, leave Cazarès. She’d worked there nearly ten years, and she’d realized—suddenly, about six months ago—that she no longer relished her responsibilities or enjoyed her position. The spirit of Cazarès had gone, she thought, and had been gone for a while, perhaps as long as five years; she had just been slow to realize it. Lazare had disguised the alteration, of course; with unflagging energy—an energy she suspected ate him away—he herded them all on, never relaxing his standards, never acknowledging their collective pretense. He knew the heart had gone out of the whole enterprise; he knew they were trying to breathe life into the dead, but his cold refusal to acknowledge that fact in the smallest degree drove them all on. No one dared to question, or express doubt or dissent.