I’m afraid there are just not enough details to go on.

Please let me know further progress,

Curt

Before talking to the artist’s three contacts, I wanted to resolve for myself, once and for all, the issue of births, deaths and marriages. When I first thought of looking for the unknown mother, I had reviewed various strategies, but the most likely to be successful had always seemed to me to be either the local papers or the registry of deaths. I had had confidence in old-fashioned archival leg-work, using the local press or the death registry.

At the beginning of my search I had been put off by what the international undertakers who worked with the Foreign Office had told me about the lack of a centralized register of deaths in France, but given the key role this could play in resolving the mystery, I had to be sure. I could find no sign of a French register on the internet. I contacted the British version and they put me through to the department specializing in overseas registers. The lady confirmed that the French have no such register, and that all records are held in the local town halls. I asked if, in the UK, it would be possible to track down someone with only a first name and an age, with no date or location of death. No, I was told, of course not.

Back in France once more, I picked a town hall. Since the odds of finding the one mairie that held Maurice’s details were so unfavourable, it seemed to make little difference where I started. The capital was most congenial and convenient for me, and presumably held the largest registry, so I decided to start with the closest. The births, deaths and marriages register had been so important to my search that I felt I still could not take at face value the information about the regional system but needed to go to a local archive and see if a personal appearance could charm – or persuade, or nag, or even bribe – someone into unlocking a magical database somewhere. I found it hard to credit that a modern nation famously unified by Napoleon, a nation where legend claimed that the Minister for Education knew exactly what each French child was doing at a specific time of day throughout the country, would not have a centralized archive of its population details.

The mairie of the 16th arrondissement was ostentatiously massive. Bedding plants flanked an entrance that asserted its nineteenth-century civic pomposity. An ornate staircase led upwards to corridors in which harassed citizens hurried past clutching sheaves of documents. At one doorway a woman implored an official, ‘There must be a solution.’ She pleaded and wept as the bureaucrat gently closed the door in her face.

An ‘administrative agent’ had agreed to see me and talk me through the system. She was an older woman with streaky blonde hair, heavily made up and manicured, and with a wrinkled décolleté emphasized by a skimpy cardigan. At first she was delighted to show off her knowledge, limited as it was. Yes, the records were kept there for one hundred years. Then they were sent off to a national archive in some boulevard in the 19th arrondissement. From 1989 onwards, records were held on computer in the local town hall, with a duplicate record of death being sent to the town hall where the person had been born. She twisted the computer screen slightly so that I could see the columns of deaths, and indeed I soon spotted a Maurice, deceased in December 1996.