After a night that saw 12 more people die in a Paris-area apartment fire, here's some excerpts from a BBC Online story about Paris's dilapidated housing stock.

The writer, Caroline Wyatt, is talking about Fofanna Satou and her husband, immigrants from the Ivory Coast and living in a ostensibly desirable district in Paris:

I have seen poverty across the former Soviet Union, in Afghanistan and southern Iraq.

Yet the state of this slum in the middle of one of Europe's richest cities comes as a physical shock.

Authorities have identified hundreds of run-down buildings in the capital

The front door opens into the living room, which is where this family of five lives, cooks, eats and washes.

Just space for one sofa, two chairs and a gas oven in the corner, powered by a canister, near where the washing hangs out to dry.

All immaculately clean, or as clean as you can keep somewhere when you have no kitchen and no bath; where you wash up in a tiny sink next to the lavatory, making sure that you watch the floor so you do not get bitten by the rats. But at least they scare off the cockroaches.

Slung on Fofanna's back in a bright, West African scarf is her youngest child, 17-month-old Baba.

After 10 years on the waiting list for a council flat, Fofanna no longer believes in her dream of a decent home

He is dozing but occasionally wakes to give an asthmatic cough.

"It's the damp," his mother explains. "He's been sick since he was born."

But now Fofanna has had enough.

She is frightened. Her cousin was badly injured leaping to safety from a second storey window when fire broke out recently in a similar squat a few streets away.

His neighbours were not so fortunate.

They and their children died, trapped on an upper floor as the flames turned the night sky red with fire and black with billowing smoke.