This is where the girls landed. Photo by the author

When two 14-year-old French girls jumped to their death from the 17th storey of a tower block in Paris, leaving a note that said “Life Isn’t Worth It”, I spent the next week following the huge media storm that blew up around them.

I first followed reporters to Cité Montmousseau in the southern suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine. At the foot of the building they jumped from, I saw a small mountain of flowers, lots of poems and goodbye notes but no gothic jewels and no blood stains—as mentioned in many articles. By the way, Ivry-sur-Seine is a very quiet town, far from the “suburban ghetto jungle” cliché that French TV described it as.

The day they died, the two girls, named only as Marion and Virginie, skipped school to go to their boyfriend Benjamin’s flat “where they used to smoke weed while listening to death metal” (AP dispatches). Marion and Virginie asked Benjamin and Julien, another friend, to wait in the living room while they prepared a “surprise”.

One of them called out from the bedroom,“OK, come in.” Ben opened the door. Marion and Virginie stood on the windowsill, their hands tied together. They smiled. And jumped.

Because of the sensationalist and predictable brow-furrowing and hand-wringing editorials, which blamed obvious targets like Marilyn Manson and marijuana, the girls’ funeral plans were kept secret. But it wasn’t hard to fnd out the details.

After ten days of media storm, I was expecting to see a lot more people at Virginie’s funeral. There were only family members (43 according to an undertaker’s assistant), maybe 20 school friends and a hundred people from Ivry and Vitry, ten civilian cops but no other journalists. The priest gave a nice speech, asking forgiveness for a Catholic church that didn’t bury suicides for centuries. When they played a song by Hoobastank everybody in the church cried. Then they announced the burying would be private.

I went there one hour later, hiding and waiting for everyone to leave. Then I approached Virginie’s grave. Noticing the teddy bear engraved in the marble, I finally realised how young the girls were.

And I felt really, really creepy about being there. And not much else at all.

What did I learn about Marion and Virginie from reading all these reports and following the trail of all the other journalists? Well, I didn’t find any good explanations about their suicide. There didn’t seem to be any. And why should we care anyway?

I suppose the one thing I learned was that reality isn’t as fluid or logical as journalists would like it to be.

MATHIEU BERENHOLC