Bourgoin was a lover of cinema, and the walls of his apartment were lined with an immense collection of VHS cassettes. Among these was a hand-labelled series of recorded newscasts, showing all manner of accidents and natural disasters. He kept a trove of photographs of cadavers in various states of mutilation, which he liked to show around, and also delighted in telling the story of his mother’s first husband, a German who had been decapitated by the Nazis. “He was a charming young man,” a friend from that period told me, “who had an extreme attraction to the macabre.”