Nicolas can’t wait two days. He’s pretty sure that she lives in Ménilmontant or Batignolles, so gets a list of the pharmacies in both from city directories. It takes him half a day to find the right one. She clocks off work at six and he follows her home.

Having made a note of her address, he buys flowers and bribes the doorman to let him in. He pauses on the staircase at the sound of what he thinks is a child crying. A maid answers the door. Nicolas is flummoxed. Who should he ask for? Bessie? Yulia? Ms Gelfman? God forbid, Mrs Verzilova?

A relaxed, unselfconscious version of Bessie arrives distractedly at the maid’s shoulder to see who the tongue-tied visitor is, and congeals at the sight of him.

‘I need to talk to you,’ he says. Bessie nods to let the maid know she should leave them, then joins him on the landing and pulls the door shut behind her. She crosses her arms and waits.

Nicolas experiences the paralysis common to lovers and writers who are daunted by the task of revivifying old words. ‘I love you’, ‘I can’t stop thinking about you’ and ‘We are meant to be together’ are phrases that are well past their useby date, even in 1886.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he says, cleaving to the faint owl-hoot of truth in his heart. ‘I’ve lived in a kind of exile from myself since I was seventeen years old. I’ve been busy trying to make my fortune and escape from where I grew up. I must have succeeded because the last time I went home I felt like a total stranger. But the thing is, I feel like a stranger here too. The one place I haven’t felt like that, the one place I’ve felt like myself, better than myself in fact, is by your side.’ He pauses, not because Bessie isn’t listening – she is, and there’s a gentle sadness in her eyes – but because a child’s voice is audible from just behind the door and it’s clearly saying, ‘Mama.’

‘Come in,’ says Bessie. She pushes against the heavy door and leads Nicolas into the apartment. ‘I want you to meet my daughter.’

‘She had given birth to a crippled child.’

Marianne is three years old, immaculately dressed in a robin’s-egg-blue cotton frock and apron; the soles of her satin shoes pristine because she cannot walk. What compels attention is not her pale, sweetly pretty though fretful infant face: it’s her huge, distended skull, grotesquely swollen, hairless, frail-looking, and webbed with thin purple veins.

‘Leave us, please, Celeste,’ Bessie tells the maid, and picks up her daughter, cradling the big head in her arms. Marianne’s dark irises have half-slipped beneath her lower lids in a way that evokes a sunset. It makes her look sleepy, and is caused by the pressure in her skull. ‘She was born with chronic water in the head,’ Bessie explains. She blows a raspberry on the child’s neck and elicits a giggle. ‘You were saying something on the subject of love, I think.’