Like every other German in Paris that summer, I’d brought a camera with me. So I walked around and took some photographs. In the Parc du Champ de Mars, I photographed some German soldiers getting directions from a gendarme. When he saw me the gendarme saluted smartly, as if a German officer’s uniform really did command authority. But the way I saw it, the French police had an attitude problem. They didn’t seem to mind the fact that they’d been defeated. Back in Germany, I’d seen cops look less happy when they failed to get elected to the Prussian Police Officers’ Association.

I enjoyed another solitary dinner in a quiet restaurant on the rue de Varennes before returning to the Lutetia. The hotel was a mixture of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, but the swastika flag that appeared on the sinuous, broken-art pediment below the Lutetia’s name was the clearest indication of the neobrutalism that afflicted its guests, me included.

The bar was busy and surprisingly inviting. A Welte-Mignon pianola was playing a selection of maudlin German tunes. I ordered a cognac and smoked a French cigarette and avoided the eye of the reptilian lieutenant who’d been on the train from Berlin. When he looked like he was headed my way, I finished my brandy and left. I rode the elevator up to the seventh floor and walked along the curving corridor to my room. A maid came out of another room and smiled. To my surprise, she spoke good German.

“Would you like me to turn down your bed linen for the night, sir?”

“Thanks,” I said and, opening my door, complimented her German.

“I’m Swiss. I grew up speaking French and German and Italian. My father runs a hotel in Bern. I came to Paris to get some experience.”

“Then we have something in common,” I told her. “Before the war I worked at the Hotel Adlon, in Berlin.”

She was impressed with that, which was of course my intention, as she was not without her charms. A little homely perhaps. But I was in the mood to think well of home and homely-looking girls. And when she finished her duties, I gave her some German money and the rest of my cigarettes for no other reason than I wanted her to think better of me than I thought of myself. Especially the man I saw in the mirror on the front of the wardrobe. In some pathetic little fantasy I imagined her coming back in the small hours, knocking on my door, and climbing into my bed. As things worked out, this wasn’t so far from the mark. But that was later on, and when she left I wished I hadn’t given her my last cigarettes.