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As Ambrose Pierce wrote, “Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, pitiless and the grave, blind as a stone and irrational as a headless man.”

"I really love living here and I don't want to leave, because then I will just be running around like a headless chicken, looking for somewhere affordable," she says.

Most incongruously of all, outside a makeshift plastic doorway on a corner of the ground floor, next to piles of rubble and rubbish, stands a headless mannequin, wearing a wedding gown.

For the first year and a half of the business, I was running around like a headless chicken.

Who knows what prompted Camille Claudel, at 20, to take a blade to the clay model of her sculpture of a headless crouching nude, tilting to one side and balanced precariously on rough feet?