‘Oh,’ said Jane, ‘so the mood of the book is very heartening and uplifting?’

Ashton laughed. ‘It’s a work which asks a lot of the reader, not least a strong stomach. There is nothing like it in England. The French and the Russians are the only writers who follow a dark road like this one. Because they have no fear of scandal, no fear of fear. They show human life in all its difficulty. And they know that readers are wolves.’

‘Wolves? I have never thought of them like that. Do you think Miss Austen’s readers are wolfish?’

‘Yes. Even they. They tear at the flesh of her stories. They love to see the wicked punished or humiliated. Do we not gloat when Fanny Price rejects Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park?’

‘Yes we do. How wonderful it must be to have the power to move people to adoration or wolfishness with inventions that have sprung out of one’s mind like birds from a conjuror’s hat. Has Monsieur Mollinet mastered this power?’

‘Yes indeed: his characters live and breathe upon the page.’

Hearing his name mentioned, Guy Mollinet interrupted the conversation between Jane and Ashton, to say that Julietta, on hearing that he’d written about the Paris Morgue, asked whether he could take them there the next day. Ashton turned again to Jane. ‘What plans do you and Julietta have for tomorrow?’

Jane put down her knife and fork on her delicious plate of Saumon Napolitain and couldn’t help but recall Julietta saying to her, ‘Ashton has meetings with French publishers all morning. I will come to you after breakfast and we will lock and barricade your door and play at man–woman love. Tirard gave me the wicked appendage we will need. I swoon at the thought of it, don’t you? But it involves much physical exertion, so after it we will be ravenous. We will go to lunch at Tortoni and eat oysters and filet mignon and ice cream.’

To Ashton, she said, ‘I think Julietta wants to go shopping in the morning, but we would be free in the afternoon.’

Jane had imagined that the morgue – this house of the departed – would be very quiet, but as they passed beyond the foyer to the viewing chamber, the sound of living voices was loud and they found themselves in a great crowd of people pressed up against a wall of glass.

Beyond the glass, the bodies lay upon slabs of black marble, tilted at thirty degrees towards the spectators. All were naked, their private parts being covered with little strips of white linen no bigger than a woman’s handkerchief. And, as Ashton Sims had described to Jane the evening before, fountains of water played constantly upon the dead, running in rivulets from their heads to their feet, in order to cool them.

Jane saw that one body was much smaller than the others and her heart ached to realise that it must be the body of a child. Not only this, but the child’s body was in a state of more advanced decay than the others, suggesting that none among the daily crowds had come to claim it. The hair was almost gone from the head and the little neck seemed to have shrunk down, so that head and body were joined at the shoulders.