She described how they went to Mexico City for the ’68 Olympics. The next year, back in San Francisco, they watched the moon landing in a hotel room, then had to leave the US when it was discovered they were working illegally. Back in Sydney for a time, they decided to get married. The ceremony was small. Sylvie wore a fluffy dress she had bought the day before and Charles put a daisy through his lapel. Back in Nice, they were plagued by a cocktail of destructive forces, all the usual things that went wrong for flower children. Charles had his problems and the drug use didn’t help. Sylvie did not blame him. She blamed the cold weather that winter. She hated Auron, she said. She hated it so much she used to go back to Nice on the bus alone. When a telegram came to say her father had passed away, she flew back to Sydney for the funeral, and that was it for things with Charles.

Speaking of that time, she didn’t bring up her pregnancy at first. She told me about it eventually, in a later lunchtime conversation. The baby had lived to term but it didn’t come out well. Something had gone wrong, though no one could say what. It could happen, she knew that now. It was one of those things, she said. At least she had seen her son briefly: a silent waxy creature, not pink like he should have been. She had given birth to him in Nice, in a ward under a picture of Jesus on the cross, a scarecrow of a man. When a nurse asked if they wished to speak to a nun, Charles scowled and said no – according to the Church, their baby would be going to Limbo.

Sylvie told me this story when speaking not of Charles, but of her mother, a woman she described as ‘sharp as paint’: severe and unforgiving. She didn’t mean to be that way, Sylvie thought, she couldn’t help being stiff; she was just not an expressive person. When Sylvie came back from France, they met at a restaurant, neutral ground. Her mother, immaculately groomed even in the depths of mourning, looked her daughter over and said, ‘I have to say, you look good.’ Caught off guard by the compliment, Sylvie said in a rush, ‘Mother, I lost my baby.’ Then she cried a little as her mother looked on, pained, and after a time they asked for the bill.

The rekindled romance continued all that year. The emails and texts were short but dense with information. Each was gaining a sense of how the other lived. Sylvie learned that Charles still had the old apartment on the Boulevard Gambetta. His father had died the year before, and the winding up of his estate allowed Charles to quit his job at Aeros Bassiel, where he had worked for some years as a glorified English teacher.