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tale, which he published early in the twentieth century.
    It didn’t take me long to track down the original manuscript of Augustine’s book, which was kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Getting access to it was relatively easy; my credentials as an academic and a reference from Nick in Venice helped me in that respect.
    Before I began my research, however, I decided I would try to get a more emotional feel for Augustine by visiting the two places in Paris where she still had some sort of real presence. One was the Musée d’Orsay, where her portrait hung in the permanent collection. The other was her grave in the famous Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, where other such great libertines as Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison were also laid to rest.
    I went to the cemetery first. The graveyard at Père-Lachaise was like a small city. I was astonished at the size of some of the tombs, which were almost as big as the last flat I had rented back in London. They were like proper houses for the dead, with doors and – in some cases – glazed windows. Some even had little tables inside. Vagabonds, who stashed their sleeping bags there among the long dried-out floral arrangements, had made some into real homes. Wandering aimlessly, I happened across the stunning Raspail family monument, with its enormous and mysterious veiled statue clinging onto one wall as though ready to fall down in grief. Later I found Oscar Wilde’s fabulous Epstein tomb, with its stony sphinxes now behind a glass screen to prevent overenthusiastic visitors from kissing the white marble away. By comparison, Augustine had a modest gravestone, grey and plain, carved with only her names and the dates of her birth and death. I felt a wave of pity break over me as I realised she had not even made it to my age. Nowhere near. She had died in January 1847 at the age of twenty-four.
    But she was obviously not forgotten. Her grave was not covered in graffiti expressions of love and small gifts like Jim Morrison’s, but there was a small posy of peonies in the marble vase by the headstone. They were beautiful flowers, deep pink and almost obscenely vibrant in a place of such timeless solemnity. I wondered who had left them there. I wondered if, assuming the movie I was working on ever got made, Augustine’s admirer would have more competition in the future as people came to love her screen reincarnation and so honoured her memory in this place where her old bones lay.
    I took a few photographs of the grave to add to my notes and spent another hour or so wandering around the long alleys of the dead, spotting names I recognised from my A-level French literature class. Away from the celebrity graves and the crowds of morbid tourists, stray cats weaved their way in and out of the tombs. It was a scene that would have appealed enormously to my eighteen-year-old self with all her emo tendencies. It was those Gothic Romantic tendencies that made me choose to be a historian. I supposed they’d also made me susceptible to my great imaginary romance in Venice. I paused by the empty urn that had once contained the mortal remains of the great soprano Maria Callas. There was a woman who knew what it was like to be unlucky in love.
    Far more cheering was Augustine’s portrait in the Musée d’Orsay. She found herself there not because of her notoriety or even because of her beauty, but because of the fame of the portrait artist, one Remi Sauvageon.
    Remi Sauvageon became famous for his work on the fringes of the Impressionist movement, but his portrait of Augustine was from an earlier period in his career and was striking in its realism. It might have been a photograph. You almost had to put your nose on the painting to see a brushstroke.
    He had pictured Augustine standing next to a fireplace, leaning on the mantel with one elegant bare arm. She was wearing a long green dress that revealed her gently rounded porcelain-white shoulders. Her hair was pinned up with two plaits looped