Fleur, Fleur. Once a film festival had invited him to Brittany as a judge and he and Fleur had stayed in a dilapidated but grand chateau. The place had excited her: there were a lot of important directors with younger women. She had pulled up her skirt and sat astride him against a background of crumbling plaster and scraps of tapestry – he remembers a maid carrying a cornucopia of fruits – and they had arrived downstairs for the opening dinner – all the richness of the Breton coast was on display – in a febrile state. He was seated next to the Mayor’s wife and they discussed oysters and crustaceans. His French was not up to more detailed conversation and anyway she had none, although like most French people she respected something called ‘la culture’: ‘La culture de la région est très forte,’ she said confidently. Across the table Fleur was charming a fellow judge, a man who had won the Prix Goncourt twenty-five years before, and had dedicated his subsequent life to smoking and young women. Fleur sucked oysters lasciviously and glanced suggestively at Artair as he struggled to find something interesting to say about araignées de mer and huitres. On the wall behind Fleur and the laureate, who was working hard on his Gallic intellectual act, was a fishing net adorned with crabs and lobsters. From this distance it was impossible to tell if they were real, but in front of the net there was a huge table on which mountains of seafood were piled in that quasi-artistic style that the French favour, so that lobsters reared up in heraldic contest with spider crabs and thousands of shrimps advanced on the mussels; it looked like a battle panorama – the Battle of Waterloo, recreated by seafood. Probably, he thinks now, the festival was funded by the Société de Pisciculture de Bretagne. And he sees a certain symmetry: he is funded by Binster’s; a few pasties are not in the same league as lobsters and spider crabs rampant, but they are also in the cause of art.