They decided to share the love, telling their friends they’d been to an ‘experience’ at a pop-up gallery space right here on rue Clauzel. A show called Idiopathy, apparently the first in a series of three short-run pieces that they’re rather loftily calling a ‘season’.

So I immediately scuttled off to see if I could get tickets for this show. Long story short, you can’t. The fact that I got in feels like some sort of miracle. It just so happens that as I stepped forward, after queueing behind seven other people who I watched getting turned away one by one, the woman at the door got a call. Someone had been eaten by a purple hippopotamus (that’s what she said) and there was one slot freed up, first come first served. I was there first.

That was the last night of the show, I found out; it had run for just a week. Under ‘Coming Up’, the Metamuse website only says ‘watch this space’, so you may think it’s a bit pointless for me to be telling you all this, but I’m telling you about it because it’s the first show I’ve seen, maybe ever, that didn’t disappoint me. I didn’t have any expectations going in, but even if I had, the show would have not only met them, but exceeded them, and if you read my reviews regularly, you know what a rare statement that is.

Well-conceived, meticulously planned, and incredibly produced, which raises questions. Whoever’s paying for this isn’t going to make their money back with ticket sales.

* * *

Let’s get it out of the way. I don’t like sharing headphones. Even though the woman at the entrance made a show of unwrapping the (biodegradable potato starch) plastic wrap off the headphones in front of me, I had visions of those airline sets simply being collected in a trash bag along with discarded tissues and puke bags and sneezed-on menus and twenty-seven-day-old in-flight magazines that are soft from desperate fingering, then being perfunctorily sprayed with an empty aerosol before being sealed up again for the next flight. I returned the doorperson’s favour of transparency and fished my sanitising gel out of my bag, and gave the headphones a performative rub before proceeding.

The man at the next counter passed me a blindfold, similarly wrapped in plastic.

* * *

So who are Olivia Jouval and Rashida Barnes?

(And do you notice that I’m deliberately avoiding telling you about the show? For one thing, it’s bloody hard to describe to you without, you know, experiencing it yourself. And for another, I want to hold it to myself – I’ve searched longer and harder for this moment than that floaty couple at Coupe de Miel, and am less generous about sharing. My editor tells me it’s my job, but since I’m being paid per word, let’s see how long I can leave you in suspense.)

The Metamuse website and Instagram account is all one can easily find about Jouval and Barnes. The bio goes something like, ‘Olivia Jouval and Rashida Barnes are the founders and creative directors of Metamuse.’ That’s it. And of course, the only images we get to see of these mysterious creative directors are the heavily disguised portraits of Jouval that have become something of a trademark. Rashida Barnes always remains behind the scenes, unexposed.