The address was not in Paris, but in the outlying part of Ville-d’Avray. It occurred to me to write a letter, but I soon abandoned that idea for I determined that a note alone would not serve my purposes. I knew I must see her, if not to lay to rest the matters which had plagued me since the day she swept me from her house at Meudon into the cold. The lesson she had imparted to me upon that day was perhaps the most formative instruction that I had ever received. I wished her to know this.

It was a clear day with a fresh wind in the middle of May; the sixteenth of the month, as I recall. The fields were newly verdant with the first scarlet poppies waving like flags among them. I travelled by chaise to the address I had been given: ‘L’Hospice des soeurs de Dieu’, upon the rue Fontaine.

It was a plain, whitewashed building set around a small, quiet courtyard. The house itself, a former monastery, was now inhabited by the mayor and his family.

I was shown to her rooms, or rather her room, where she sat with her back to me. There was little more to her lodgings than a trestle bed, some spindly chairs and a table, and a dark wooden chest of drawers. In the corner sat a small enamel stove, upon which was perched a copper kettle. A basin of white china and a pitcher were set out. The shelves were decorated with paper cuttings, which I supposed had been made by the sisters. Upon the wall were a few miniatures and silhouettes: no one whom I recognized. That image which I had painted of her in 1792 was not among them. Of all the furniture, jewels and attire she had owned, of her two houses, her carriages, and her sapphire (the true fate of which I could not begin to fathom) there remained only these scant remnants of her once opulent life. The annuities upon which she had staked her livelihood no longer sustained her. Indeed, half of the princes and dukes and marquises who might have paid them were dead, their estates long dispersed. A house and furniture may be burned and jewels stolen . . . I remembered her saying to me as we rode to the Comédie-Française.

Even from behind I knew her: the long back, though the neck was somewhat stooped and the shoulders curved. She had not the posture in her old age.

‘Mrs Elliot,’ I said. She did not turn. ‘Mrs Elliot,’ I said again, this time louder and more forcefully. She moved slightly.

With some hesitation, I approached her as she stared out of the window. Her features were as I recalled. Her nose was as beak-like, and her forehead as high, but her eyes seemed blank, clouded by near-blindness.