Minna decided that it would help if they stirred things up by driving out of the city on Sundays. ‘We need to rest our eyes on distance. And you have to come with us, Lili. Montpellier will be unbelievably tedious without me.’

So we drove out to the Pont du Gard one Sunday, and on another to Aigues-Mortes. Nick’s car was a beat-up blue Citroën DS that he’d bought after reading Barthes. He called it the Goddess, borrowing Barthes’ pun. Minna didn’t have her licence, and I didn’t have an international one, so Nick always drove. I sat in front with a road map on my knee because Minna claimed to have no sense of direction – she said that she often got lost in London, where she’d spent her whole life.

Nick drove fast. The Goddess dashed along Napoleonic roads, sped jauntily past rivals, poured herself around precipitous bends. Minna shouted and threatened from the back. ‘Clothilde, are you forgetting the courage with which your father faced the firing squad?’ asked Nick. ‘What a patently trumped-up charge those Gaullists brought against him after the war – it was nothing but a show trial! Applying a blowtorch to snivelling résistants was that dear man’s patriotic duty. No one called him a traitor at the time.’ Nick smiled sideways at me, cigarette stuck Belmondo-style to his lip, and said, unnecessarily, ‘I love driving.’ It was impossible not to feel drawn to him then – his happiness was a force field in the smoky car.

There was a cold, clear Sunday with the kind of light you feel you can draw down into yourself if you put up your hand. We discussed driving to Sète, where Paul Valéry was buried. Minna had no interest in him – she called him Paul Celery. She wanted to go up into the hills instead.

At first, the road was a procession of naked plane trees with white bands painted on their trunks; their shadows, precisely spaced across the bitumen, striped it like a flag. The Goddess arrowed past them and up into the garrigue, the herby, limestone Languedoc scrubland. We came to a side road, left the car there and set off on foot, uphill on a stony track. I tied my jacket around my waist and rolled up my sleeves as we climbed. Stride, stride – I was Simone de Beauvoir at last.

Birds were flinging themselves into the air. The messy countryside was full of character. Runtish trees, hung with red fruit, stood here and there. Nick and I wondered if they were safe to eat. Minna had fallen behind us, oohing over rosemary and thyme. ‘It’s bringing out her inner Scarborough Fair,’ said Nick in a stage whisper. ‘Prepare to intervene.’