Soon, however, going to the theatre led to dressing up whenever she went. Her outfits remained simple and always in very good taste. The modesty of her manner and her irresistible gracefulness were in fact enhanced by the simplicity of the dresses she wore. But after a while she began to wear two great big rhinestones dangling from her ears, strings of imitation pearls around her neck, pinchbeck bracelets on her arms and in her hair various combs decorated with all sorts of cheap, fake stones.

Her husband, shocked a little by the vulgarity of his wife’s taste, would often say: ‘My dear, if we cannot afford real jewels then you must wear the rarest gems of Nature, that’s to say your very own grace and beauty.’

But she merely smiled her sweet smile at him, saying, ‘I can’t help it. I just adore them. I know you’re right, but that’s the way I am. Of course I’d love the genuine article but chance is a fine thing!’

She would run the strings of pearls through her fingers, hold up the facets of cut glass to catch the light and say, ‘Don’t they look good! You’d swear they were genuine, wouldn’t you?’

And he would smile back, saying, ‘You’re a real little gypsy, that’s what you are!’

Sometimes, as they were chatting by the fire of an evening, she would put on the tea-table between them the leather jewel box in which she kept what Monsieur Lantin referred to as her baubles. She would sit and examine these trinkets with passionate attention and a deep, secret delight all of her own. She would insist on draping some of them round her husband’s neck, then burst out laughing.

‘You look such a scream,’ she would say, then fling herself into his arms and shower him with kisses.

She went to the Opéra one winter night and came back shivering with cold. The following day she developed a cough. A week later she died of pneumonia.

Lantin nearly followed her to the grave. He fell into such a deep depression that within a month his hair had turned completely white. He wept from morning till night and his heart almost broke under the unbearable pain he was suffering. He was haunted by his dead wife’s smile, her voice, and of course her charm.

Time did not heal. Often at work, as his colleagues were chatting away about nothing in particular, they would see his face fall, his nose wrinkle and tears well up in his eyes. His face would become contorted with grief and he would break into sobs.

He had kept his wife’s room just as she had left it and every day he would lock himself in there and think about her. All her furniture and even her dresses were left exactly as they had been on the last day of her life.