Mia’s husband—my dear friend, my brother—was called Renard. I played guitar then, and I was young. You have to be young to play the guitar, unless you are very great. It took me ten years to discover I had no ear, and five years more to discover I had no head to remember the words. My fingers, my technique, they were above the rest, but I was not gifted. Renard was gifted. He played the piano more beautifully than you have ever heard, with no music, all by ear. He could play anything. He used to help me, writing down the music, working out the harmonies, teaching me songs. We played at parties—not for money, because that was not our aim, but people asked us to come, and we had a trumpet and bass and clarinet and the whole thing.

Renard had some money, and he was raised with a rich life. Because of the music, he met a girl, Elsa, who was a little blonde operettiche singer, with a little voice. Elsa had a daughter, and she and the child were always with Renard. After some years, Renard said, “I have to marry this girl. I can’t not marry this girl.” We all said, Why? Keep on like you are. But he had to marry her, for his soul maybe, I don’t know. He adopted the child and I became godfather, and then Elsa became jealous of Renard’s ability, of his success and his friends, and she started to drink.

At this time I married my first wife, and I could not impose Renard and his family on my wife. I loved Renard, and the child was my goddaughter, but Elsa was too much. When this happens, you grow apart, and I did not see him for some years. Eventually he divorced her.

We were close again, when he divorced, and we had the same friends at the Travellers’ Club and in the south. When he met Mia, the actress from Martinique, we all understood. She was so sexy, and he loved her, and she was fun. But she had the not-black, not-white bambini from the German, and this was Paris, and Paris was not so generous. It was not so well accepted then, to have these children. They all moved south to a big white house in Cap-Ferrat, and Renard had some money still, but he was gambling it away. My wife would not go to visit there, but I went. It was like a colony. The girl Mia and the green bambini were only the beginning. There were also the girl’s two sisters, with bambini of their own. Kids all over the house, you did not know whose. They always had guests, because they had poker games in the house, and the guests came to take Renard’s money. When he was out of money he would sit at the piano, and they shouted out what to play.