Along the shoreline of the town there were cafés and little shops selling the usual tourist tat – everything from tea towels and lavender bags to calendars and tin trays. There was even a casino.

Near the Gare Maritime stood a small house, divided into two apartments – the kind of building which in England would be called a maisonette.

In the lower apartment lived Theresa Simmonds.

When the bottom fell out of her life, Theresa had left her home in London and moved here permanently. She had been coming up to the age of sixty when she lost her job; she had no pension yet and was left with no income and nothing to do. So, on a whim, she had sold up and moved to Bellevue-sur-Mer.

For the last three years Theresa had been part of a tightly knit gang of expats, who had been running La Mosaïque, a small restaurant on the seafront, a few doors down from her flat.

Theresa cooked. Her friends William, Benjamin and Carol managed the front of house, taking the positions of welcome desk and bookings, maître d’, hostess, sommelier and waiting tables between them. They also did the lion’s share of the boring stuff: checking that their licences and insurance were up to date and filling in the annual tax returns. Ex-actress Sally Connor, formerly Doyle, helped out all round, in particular doing the publicity and driving the van to pick up supplies, like the daily fresh fish from a stall on the shore in nearby Cagnes-sur-Mer. Zoe, very much older than the others (though, if you had been rude enough to ask her, she would deny it), had invested her money in the restaurant, and between trips to spas in Switzerland, from whence she returned home with puffed lips and a dubiously smooth forehead, she brought many of her well-heeled friends to La Mosaïque to eat and spend, spend, spend.

Theresa, at a mere three years’ residency, was the newcomer among the gang. And, as her French was still not good enough, she was unable therefore to do anything demanding public-relations skills, unless it was in English. But, anyway, she was happiest behind the scenes in the kitchen.

The purchase of the restaurant had come with the unexpected benefit of a unique mosaic medallion which had been cemented into the pretty floor by the previous owner. The mosaic turned out to be a self-contained, signed work by Pablo Picasso.

Today was an exciting day for Theresa and all the other owners of La Mosaïque, for the mosaic medallion, valued by experts for at least one million euros, was about to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in Paris.

The gang had had to wait a long time for this. The artwork was taken to the French capital, where it was checked out and researched. After several months it was proved to be a genuine creation of the famed master of twentieth-century art.

Once estimates and reserves, along with very costly insurance and storage costs, had been put on the medallion, it was photographed and advertised all over the world, and, after what felt like a very long time indeed to the owners of La Mosaïque, it was finally put into the annual Sale of Important Modern Art.