What exactly happened that led an Irish couple to a hotel on the Côte d'Azur and the disposal of a dead baby in a plastic bag? Lara Marlowe reports on a case that is troubling France and prompting questions about Ireland
The Irish couple had already left in the ambulance for Broussaille Hospital in Cannes when French gendarmes found the baby boy, wrapped in a hotel towel inside a plastic bag, hidden behind a curtain in the hotel corridor.
"I just saw a beautiful baby and that's it," Mr Peter Van Santen, the director of the Miramar Beach Hotel in Théoule-sur-Mer, said.
In a dozen interviews about the tragedy, it was the only time I detected sadness. "Unfortunately". Mr Van Santen's words trailed off. "Without life."
Since the gendarme's macabre discovery on the morning of February 12th, the lives of a 21-year-old Irish woman and her 35-year-old boyfriend, have been altered forever.
In Ireland, politicians, the church hierarchy and the media have taken intense interest in the tragedy, which in other circumstances might have been treated as a routine criminal case on the French Riviera.
The young woman has been indicted on suspicion of murdering the infant, for which she risks life in prison.
Her boyfriend is in pre-trial detention in Grasse prison while he is investigated for "failure to assist a person in danger" and "failure to denounce a crime".
If charged, tried and convicted, he could face a 10 year prison sentence.
In some ill-defined way, the mysterious death of the baby boy on the Côte d'Azur seems trammelled up with the March 6th abortion referendum. (Ironically, John's bail hearing will probably take place on the same day.)
To reduce it, as one source did, to "an Irish obsession with anything involving Fallopian tubes", seems simplistic.
The issues at stake make the story more resonant of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy than a lurid tabloid tale.
For nine months, the young woman kept her unwanted pregnancy a secret from everyone, including - according to his family, friends and lawyer - from her boyfriend.
Not once did she consult a doctor, and she nearly died of a massive haemorrhage while giving birth.
She is still recovering in the penitentiary wing of Pasteur Hospital in Nice. Some time in the near future, probably next week, the young woman will be interviewed by the investigating magistrate, Judge Thierry Laurent.
In about a year from now, Judge Laurent will decide whether to send the Irish couple to the Alpes-Maritimes assize court for trial by nine jurors and three magistrates.
In the deposition that the young woman made to gendarmes on February 13th, she said her boyfriend did not know she was pregnant and that he was not the father of the infant.
No one has broached the question of who the father might be. The paternity issue will be resolved by a DNA test in March.
Whether her boyfriend knew she was pregnant is crucial to his defence. Her sister, the airline staff who twice allowed her to board planes on February 11th, the hotel receptionist and the room service waiter did not realise she was pregnant.
She told friends and relatives who expressed concern at her weight that it was the result of an eating disorder, caused by homesickness and loneliness from her move to Luxembourg. But could her boyfriend have failed to know she was expecting?
Mr Gerard-Georges Girard, his lawyer, says the infant was conceived in May or June of last year, at a time when the couple were not together.
French police have begun an in-depth investigation into their personalities and relationship, which according to Mr Girard was founded on "a certain sense of propriety".
The boyfriend had been her teacher at convent school, where she may have become infatuated with him. They apparently started dating much later.
Her distraught parents have rented an apartment in Nice to be near their daughter. French law requires that they lodge a written request each time they want to see her.
The judge has promised not to refuse requests from them, but this week they allegedly heard their daughter crying "Mamie, Mamie," and could not go to her.
Her boyfriend is described as an almost saintly person who was never a womaniser.
Although his family is affluent, he had no interest in money and devoted his spare time to charity work in the east and north of Ireland and the former Soviet Union.
Those close to him were shocked by what they thought were psychologically cruel and tasteless methods of interrogation.
She clearly attempted to hide the birth from him.
"It was as if she didn't want the person accompanying her to know she had delivered the baby," the hotel director told me the day after the infant's death.
Mr Girard says that when she went into labour on the night of February 11th, she told her boyfriend that her bloated stomach and pains were caused by digestive problems.
"She walked the halls of the hotel while he waited up," the lawyer explained. "Around 4 a.m., she came back to bed, and she seemed better. He fell asleep.
"He woke up between 10 and 10.30. By then it was over. She came back covered in blood, and that's when he really got worried. The entire delivery happened out of his sight and knowledge.
"While he was asleep on the 6th floor, she gave birth alone, in the [public] toilet on the second floor."
Mr Raymond Doumas, the public prosecutor whose recommendations Judge Laurent followed in initiating proceedings against the Irish couple, admits it is "probable" that she tried to hide the delivery from her boyfriend.
"But he couldn't not see what was going on. You cannot give birth and hide it from the person you share a bed with."
The prosecutor believes the infant died of suffocation when he was sealed inside the plastic bag.
The pathologist's report, expected next week, will prove it, he says.
"The alveoli in the lungs have a certain look - it can be verified in an absolutely scientific manner."
If she committed no crime, then the charge of "failure to denounce a crime" will not hold up against him..
"We don't know if the results of the pathologist's report will be very affirmative, or nuanced," says Mr Girard.
One question obsesses Mr Doumas. If, as she claimed in her deposition, the infant died of natural causes, how did it come to be hidden in a plastic bag on the sixth floor hotel corridor?
"It doesn't add up," he says. "If it was an unfortunate accident, they should have found the infant in the toilet where she had just given birth - not four floors up. I want to know who put it there."
Rarely has a criminal investigation been fraught with so much potential for Franco-Irish misunderstanding.
The Irish couple's families may be quick to blame French authorities for what they see as bungling or unfair treatment - to which the French are likely to reply with memories of the botched Toscan du Plantier case.
And although the events at the Miramar Beach Hotel could have happened anywhere, the French have interpreted her denial of her pregnancy as a symptom of Irish inhibitions.
Ms Delphine Girard, the boyfriend's other lawyer, said she was stunned by telephone calls she received from the media in Ireland.
"They were so eager to condemn her," she explains.
"No one tries to put themselves in her place. She's a young woman in distress, who's starting out in life with an enormous handicap."
Ms Girard, who lived briefly with a family in Dublin as a teenager, believes that had the young woman been from any country other than Ireland, she might have sought help from a family planning clinic.
"She feels shame towards her parents, towards society and towards the church," Ms Girard added.
"She's become a pariah. Even if she is not judged in court, she has already been judged morally by the society in which she lives, and which she grew up in."