Long-time resident of the sixth arrondissement, author of Saying Yes, Saying No (1962), of Flicker (1966), of Sisyphus Rex (1969, his first play in French), and thirteen other productions all well received other than by those critics of the far left or far right who found his work maddeningly uncommitted; one-time artistic director of the Théâtre Artaud in San Francisco, now part-time lecturer in Dramaturgy and Eastern European literature at the Sorbonne (Monday and Thursday afternoons), László Lázár struck the veal and recalled his first encounter with the Wylies, a night in ’61 in a jazz cellar on rue St Benoît, when the woman who now sliced vegetables at his side, telling him about her insomnia and her trouble with doctors, emerged from a cloud of tobacco smoke, her hair cut short like Jean Seberg’s in A Bout de Souffle, smiling at him as he sat at a table with a half-dozen other émigrés, pale young men with bad teeth smoking maize-paper cigarettes and drinking slowly in a doomed attempt to save money. Her smile then had told him everything important he needed to know about her: that she was kind, and as much without darkness as any human being he would ever encounter. István invited her to sit and found a chair for her, but it was László she talked to, leaning forward under the bray of the saxophones to laugh with him and listen to his thickly accented French. Fate, of course, if you believed in such things – kismet. And later that evening came a second such moment when she introduced him to a crop-haired American, a tall, loose-limbed athletic type with the steady blue stare of a Hollywood farm boy. Franklin Sherman Wylie – only five years older than László, and yet as he stood behind Laurence, his hand across the shoulder strap of her dress, his old GI shirt spattered with paint stains that he wore like medals, he seemed gifted with that same glamorous and manly confidence Péter had possessed, and which László found so lamentably absent in his own life.

As they came out into the starlit oxygen of St Germain and said their goodbyes in the narrow street, László’s heart, always inflammable, ignited; but though he desired them both, it was Franklin he kissed in his dreams, a truth that Franklin soon discerned and then tolerated with an amused grace. The following week they went together to see Krapp’s Last Tape sung by Michael Dooley at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre, then sealed the friendship, always a delicate thing of three, in an epic night walk to Sacré Coeur, ending at first light in a bar beside Les Halles, breakfasting on pig’s trotters and Alsace beer.