That night I slept on a feather mattress with my head on a strange, long, hard French bolster, and I woke up the next morning just as it was getting light. I could hear voices and people passing outside so I left the warmth of my feather nest and pattered barefoot over the bare floorboards to the window. I unhooked the shutters and leaned out. The sky in the east was shell-pink, lined on the horizon with unearthly green. There were twenty or thirty women fanning out between the jasmine bushes. They wore headscarves and aprons like Madame Lesert, and some of them had babies tied in shawls on their backs. Round their waists were sacks with wide open mouths and they moved up and down the rows of bushes, picking off the white starry flowers and dropping them into their sacks. They called out to each other in different languages, not French. I learned later that these were Italian and Portuguese migrant workers.

And the scent.

I understood Philippe’s quaint gesture now. The jasmine perfume was strongest at dawn and it rose up to me at my window in great billows of voluptuous sweetness. I knew, as I had never grasped before, what perfume meant.

The flower pickers looked to me like something out of a picture in a book or at an art gallery. Their brown hands flew, but the scene was static, even timeless. In my ignorance, I still knew that I was watching a scene that had been the same for hundreds of years. The nape of my neck prickled at the thought.

I sat at the window for a long time, until it was fully daylight and I realised that I was hungry.

Tu as faim?

Breakfast was bread and honey that tasted of lavender. Philippe broke off chunks of his bread and dipped it into his flat bowl of milky coffee. I thought this was a very strange thing to do, and it would have been frowned on at home, but I copied him and he grinned encouragement at me.