As well as the avocados, the job also brought a largesse of baked goods – baguettes, friands and other cakes. My boyfriend at the time liked the cakes especially; he ate them as he studied, dropping crumbs between the pages. As the sugar hit his bloodstream, he became more animated, looking up to read some passage out loud. David was a philosophy student, quite intense, with a widow’s peak. Elise called him Dave, having picked that he would hate it. She claimed the guys I liked were interchangeable. I said the same about her. She always went for artists who gave off a woodsman vibe, wearing old boots and flannel shirts to show their earthiness.

At the cafe, we would eat lunch in the mid-afternoon, after the crowd had thinned and before the afternoon teas and coffees. We heaped salad leaves in bowls (serving put us off rich food) and Sylvie poured herself a tumbler of red wine with water, a way of drinking she had picked up when living in Nice. Now and again she spoke about her life – anecdotal revelations, always adding up to something less than a full account. She often deployed her stories to illustrate a moral. There was the summer she spent eating frozen grapes by the pool. ‘I blew up like a balloon, you don’t need that much fruit.’ Or she would talk about the dishonest types she’d met over the years, wanting us to know we could never be too careful. Yet on the rare occasions she spoke of her erstwhile husband, it was always with an undimmed fondness. They had lived as flower children in keeping with the age. After meeting him in Sydney, she followed him back to Nice, to an apartment on the Boulevard Gambetta. ‘The outside looked quite shit,’ she said, ‘but we had an entire floor.’

His family ran businesses in Auron, the Alpes-Maritimes ski town where she had her brush with Pompidou. They had a house in Vence, near the famous Saint-Martin hotel. You could lie by the pool, Sylvie told us, and watch the sheiks come in by helicopter. These were her everywhere years. ‘We just floated,’ she said. Going out to California, they stayed in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. ‘We went for the drugs, darling. We were very much into mescaline.’

Thinking of Joan Didion, I asked her what she wore. ‘Oh, very little, very little. Swathes of ferns in the hair. Leaves.’