As they finished their journey across The Jardin des Tuileries, the dull crunch of gravel sounding out the proof of each gentle footstep, they saw the Musée d’Orsay waiting for them across the river, a monument to the splendour of the city around them, the last bastion of beauty in a frantic world.

They stepped towards it, and as though a test from the city itself, a cloud of thick fog rose in front of them from a nearby grille, obscuring their vision and blocking their path like some bloated spectre guarding the way before them.

They exchanged the briefest of glances in which a moment of joyful excitement flitted from his face to hers, from hers to his. They strode forward, hand in hand, untroubled and unyielding.