“I’d say I’d like a dozen of them,” I said.

She knew the night like the back of her hand. A quarter of an hour later, we were pushing open the door of a bakery tucked away in a courtyard near the Palace of Justice, and entering a white hell of flour and people at work. There were men taking flaccid masses of dough and pounding them on the tables as if to punish them for their submissiveness, and others cutting them into pieces and sticking them in an oven. There were also women with white kerchiefs over their hair, mixing cream in containers.

“Oh, it’s you, princess,” one of them said. “What do you want tonight?”

Arianna pointed to various types of brioche while the women looked on indulgently. A paper cone was filled for her. She took it in both hands, because it was warm and pleasant to the touch, but that didn’t stop her from stealing a madeleine, then nudging me with her elbow as I wished the women good night on the way out.

“What are you talking about, good night?” she said, once we were out in the courtyard. “These people have been working for hours!” She sighed. “I always feel really guilty coming here, but at this time of night I’d do anything for a warm brioche, wouldn’t you?”

They were warm and fragrant, nothing like the sad little cakes you get in cafés, the ones the rest of the city would be dunking in their white-collar cappuccinos in a few hours’ time. “There must be some advantage in being rich,” I said, but she was miles away, swaying meditatively on the cobblestones of the courtyard in time to her chewing of the madeleine. “Are you looking for a loose paving stone?” I asked.

My display of Proustian culture impressed her. “There’d be no point,” she said, looking at me, her curiosity aroused. “Madeleines aren’t the way they used to be.”

“Nothing’s the way it used to be.”

“That’s a good beginning,” she said. “Go on.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s it, really. We’re living in quite depressing times, but what can we do about it? We have no choice.”

“No,” she said, holding back a smile, “no choice at all. Have you ever thought how many pleasures progress has deprived us of?”

“Oh, sure. Drinking milk from glass bottles, for instance.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s not bad. What else?”

My suggestion was leafing through books without having to take off the plastic wrapper, to which she proposed blowing up paper bags, and I said slicing ham by hand, and she said walking on rubber soles and breaking glass decorations on the Christmas tree. When I stumped her with the smell of old leather armchairs, she changed the subject.

“When would you have liked to have been born?”

“In Vienna before the end of the empire,” I said.