I was distracted by a small article on 30 May 2000 about a decision of the administrative Court of Appeal, which decreed that Joëlle and Michel Leroy (Professor of Philosophy, aged 52) could not keep their mother’s body in the freezer. Their mother, Lise, had died on 13 July 1999 and although, the article noted, she was paraplegic, she had encouraged both her children to study. They cited as justification for retaining her body the ‘very great affection’ they felt for her, and were most reluctant to consign her remains to the earth or the furnace, preferring to keep her in the kitchen. Professor Leroy intended to continue his appeal to a higher court, and was particularly disappointed by the decision ‘since this news arrives the day after Mother’s Day’.

Philogone, Fernand, Fénelon, Claudet, Rémy, Octave, Evariste, Daniel, Anne-Doris, Adalbert . . . Death’s harvest was particularly poetic on 3 May 2000. Then there were the regulars, whose families remembered them on the same date each year. Every 11 May, André’s family sent in a notice of remembrance of his death, aged 29, cremated according to his wishes in the strictest privacy. Every 28 May Lorenzo and Fabio were mourned: ‘Two stars who never stop shining.’ A photograph of two boys out for a laugh together, one with his tongue sticking out. A road accident?

The closest in age to the death I was seeking was Jérôme, kung fu vice-champion of France, aged fourteen.

As each edition was searched and discarded I felt the odds narrowing. Surely the next edition would contain the notice I sought. As the pile of papers to be searched shrank my excitement mounted.

All day I sat alone, reading obituaries of small, incomplete lives and the grief they left behind. And in the evening I would re-emerge from the majestic escalators of the library, cross the deserted planks of Mitterrand’s folly and dive once more into the métro. Too tired to deviate, too emotionally drained to socialize, I was befuddled by the collective grief of the Pas de Calais region of France.

One evening, dazed by a day trawling through the papers, I went with my Parisian host to visit an artist friend on the outskirts of the city. My existence had shrunk to the metro, the library and the death notices. We sat in the garden, sipping ginger-flavoured lemonade and talking quietly. Bamboo fringed the unkempt lawn, Ladakhi prayer flags fluttered through the foliage, a row of conifers screened off a neighbouring building. In the centre of the grass, under a little palm, sat a stone Vietnamese sage, roughly hewn and coarse but patinated into beauty.

The artist became interested in my search. She told me of her friend, a graphologist, who was known for her intuition and her psychological insights. She told me of another friend, Christine, who read tarot and had uncovered a dark secret about the artist’s husband – who had then left her. She told me about an acquaintance who was a ‘bulbologue’, a follicologist, whose mother had been a hairdresser and who had been fascinated by hair since before he could crawl. A toddlerhood spent at his mother’s feet among the shorn curls of her clients had marked him for life, and he had grown up to become a world expert on hair, consulted, she assured me, by Interpol on their most complex cases. She gave me a bright orange notelet with the contact details of all these people.