After that, Marie spent a few days studying my essays, which were all stiff from being ironed. Then she told me the story of two writers that she’d read about in a book. One of them was seventeen and was having trouble writing his novel. The other one was quite a lot older. He was very fond of the younger one, so he shut him in a room in his house with a pile of paper and a bottle of whisky, and told him to slide the pages under the door as he wrote them. When the younger one had written enough, the older one let him out. Later, the younger one died suddenly and the older one said that his grief was so great that it felt like having a limb amputated without anaesthetic. Marie thought this was a very interesting story. Personally, I thought that if he didn’t like writing, what was the point of forcing him, and perhaps that’s what killed him in the end. Alexandre Dumas certainly didn’t need to be shut in a room to write The Three Musketeers. But I kept quiet, because I could see that Marie was trying to draw a parallel with our situation, and I felt a bit flattered by that.

So she settled me down at her desk, on her work chair, with an alarming quantity of exercises and revision to do.

On her way out, she said, “I’m not locking you in and I’m not giving you any whisky, because you should never copy the way things are done in books … but it’s the same idea!”

Instead of whisky, I was allowed a glass of pomegranate juice. I could hear her sawing at her cello while I was trying to work. It took me aback, the way she was spending more and more time attacking her instrument. There was a sort of violent rage to it – she was usually so calm and collected. It was as though her life depended upon it. And in fact it did, in a way, although of course I only knew that later.

In the end, I felt as though the lines on my paper were turning into musical staves and I was walking a tightrope along them. After I’d finished my work she told me more about all her favourite composers and as time went on I got to know them really quite well – Johann Sebastian Bach, for instance, who’d been married twice and had twenty children. Marie wondered how he could have written so much music when he had all those children under his feet.

“Well, he certainly made good use of his organ,” I couldn’t resist saying.

“Very funny. And what’s more you know, he had problems with his sight.”

“Oh, really? I thought that was Beethoven.”

“No, with Beethoven it was his ears. He was as deaf as a post.”