They only really longed for things for the sake of it, because in actual fact they didn’t know what was beautiful or what people were expected to admire. My father always followed the painter or the carpenter’s advice when it came to choosing colours and shapes, nothing fancy, just the standard thing. No sense that some people surrounded themselves with objects one by one. No decorations in their bedroom, just a few framed photographs, some table-mats made for Mother’s Day and, on the mantelpiece, the large china bust of a child which the 42furniture man had given away as a free gift when they bought the corner settee.

His motto: Better to be the head of a dog than the tail of a lion.

Always this fear of being ashamed, out of place. One day he got into a first-class compartment by mistake. The inspector made him pay the difference. Another embarrassing memory, a visit to the notary clerk: he had to write ‘read and approved’ but wasn’t sure of the spelling, settled for ‘read and a proved’. On the way back he suffered the pangs of humiliation, obsessed by his mistake. He had come close to disgracing himself.

Many of the comedies made around that time portrayed naïve country lads who didn’t know how to behave in the city or in polite society (Bourvil-type roles). We would shriek with laughter at the things they said and the terrible gaffes they committed, the very ones we ourselves were afraid of making. I once read that when Bécassine was serving her apprenticeship she was told to embroider a bird on the first bib and ditto on all the others. She spent the whole afternoon sewing ditto in satin-stitch. I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t have done the same thing.

In front of people whom he considered to be important, his manner was shy and gauche and he never asked any questions. In short, he behaved intelligently. Which consisted in grasping our inferiority and refusing to accept it by doing everything possible to conceal it. We spent a whole evening wondering what on earth the headmistress had meant when she had said: ‘To play the part, your little girl will be dressed in town clothes.’ We were ashamed at not knowing what we would have known instinctively, had we not been what we were, in 43other words, inferior.

His obsession: ‘What are people going to say?’ (the neighbours, the customers, the world at large).

His maxim: never lay yourself open to the criticism of others by being polite, never expressing an opinion, and keeping a tight rein on your temper. If one of the neighbours was digging up the garden vegetables, he never looked in their direction unless he was encouraged to do so by a smile, a nod or a friendly remark. He never visited anyone without being invited, not even somebody in hospital. He never asked questions which might betray envy or curiosity, so as not to give people a hold over us. The question ‘How much did you pay for it?’ was taboo.