Johnny Rotten yelled that he didn’t know what he wanted but he knew how to get it. Dieter blew me a kiss and carried on talking to a boy with the small, sleek head of a dancer. Minna told me that she was an artist. She said that there were several assistant language teachers at the party, and led me to one of them, her boyfriend, Nick. He was talking to Deb, another assistante, who was teaching at a different school. Like me, Deb was looking for somewhere to live, but Minna and Nick had an apartment in the old town, le centre historique. They’d signed the lease in June, and spent the summer working in Toulon. Nick had a dark tan and very light blue eyes – a combination I found both creepy and sexy. He spoke kindly to Deb and me: ‘Look, you can’t leave finding a place until September. You have to know how to manage these things.’

Madame Bisset, the head of English at my lycée, had a room for rent in her house. She showed it to me one day. It was warm and bright and the head of a deer glared from one wall. The Bissets’ son had shot it to celebrate his divorce. Madame Bisset drew my attention to a hotplate: ‘You see, this is perfect for your omelette.’ Her house was a short walk from the school, which meant it was a long way from the centre of town, and the buses stopped running at eight.

In the jetlagged hours I’d spent in Paris before catching a train south, I bought a postcard of a Willy Ronis photo. It showed a naked woman washing herself at a basin, a ewer beside her on the flagstone floor. A window set deep in a wall stood open; it had no pane, only a shutter made of vertical planks. I had the boring version of Johnny Rotten’s problem: I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know how to get it. I wanted to live in le centre historique. What was leaving Australia for France if not a wish to live in le centre historique? At Dieter’s party, I said what I feared: ‘I might have to take the Bissets’ room.’

We were eating pretzels and drinking wine. The others, being English, had spent holidays and school exchanges in France. I heard that it was impossible to find decent potato crisps except in the Marks & Spencer in Paris. Deb pointed out that ‘crisp’ was a really super word because the French couldn’t say it. ‘You go around the class and they get their tongues in such a twist. It’s really sweet. You get through a good fifteen minutes that way.’