There was also her boyfriend, as we called him. He was a former prime minister, one of the Labor greats. He would come in for lunch, taking a table near the counter with his back to the room. She had never voted for him but always greeted him with, ‘Darling, great to see you.’ She would sit down with him unasked, saying, ‘The girls will bring you bread.’ He was a willing participant, addressing her as ‘doll’, and they chatted together in low tones like long-time confidants. He liked to know how business was, and always complimented her cooking. ‘You could call that a terrine,’ he said of her veal loaf.

Sylvie had known a lot of famous people and was never overawed. She had once served Pompidou himself, she liked to say, selling him a newspaper in the ski town of Auron. The president of France did not expect to have to pay, but she asked him for the money regardless.

Her flirtations were harmless, confined to the cafe. But then she got a serious crush, one that went beyond the cafe walls, unfolding in the dizzying expansiveness of cyberspace, in a flurry of emails and texts. At first she tried to hide what she was doing, but it turned out that she was back in touch with her husband, Charles Bernard, from whom she had been estranged for more than three decades.

‘And why not, I’d like to know? Why shouldn’t I write to him?’ she asked.

Sylvie loved email; she loved the thrill of a back-and-forth, the idea of conversations beaming across space. Her emails were like her texts: quick-fire compositions, never more than a few lines, with ‘you’ rendered as ‘u’ and wrapped up with strings of ‘xxx’. She tapped these missives out in the glow of the bright screen, despatching each with an expression of unmitigated glee.

I glimpsed a photo of Charles’s on her laptop one day, as I was walking past with some dirty dishes. A flash of red, a green background that might have been grass or trees, and sunlight glancing off a crop of silver hair. With the other waitress, Elise, I teased Sylvie about this long-lost husband of hers. We called him the Silver Fox. Until now, she hadn’t mentioned him much. Her marriage hadn’t been her longest relationship: in the seventies and eighties, she had spent sixteen years with a ceramicist named Erik. He had made the original brown-glazed cups and saucers for the cafe, most of which had since been lost through gradual attrition.