‘Let’s not talk about “enemies”,’ said Anton. ‘What makes a country that’s so long been your neighbour suddenly try to kill all your friends? Instead of serving you breakfast in your pension, they turn a rifle on you. Didn’t you leave a big enough tip for the waiter? I’ll never think of France as an “enemy”. It’s an absurd way of looking at the world. Or take Italy. Would they side with us, or with England, or whichever of us buys more ham from Parma? There’s no point of principle. None at all.’

‘Are you a pacifist, Anton?’

‘Maybe. Perhaps my French “governess” has made me one.’

‘Wouldn’t you fight if some foreign power sent their troops into our streets? If the Russians occupied the Opera?’

‘If it meant an end to evenings of Tchaikovsky, then …’

‘You’re such an original philistine,’ said Friedrich. ‘A Viennese who hates music … Like an artistic Englishman. Or a Frenchman who admires another country.’

‘I don’t dislike all music. I like what Delphine plays. Parts of Brahms. Most of Beethoven. It’s just that some of Mozart sounds so dry to me – like a mathematical proof.’

‘So you want to have your heart wrenched?’

‘No, I hate that. Those songs of Schubert that make you look into some icy region of death. Or worse. Who would want to go there?’

The next day, the magazine asked Anton to join the world’s press in Paris at the trial of Henriette Caillaux, which was due to start on 20 July. Madame Caillaux, the wife of the finance minister Joseph Caillaux, had gone into the offices of Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro, and shot him dead with a revolver. The newspaper had printed articles and private letters that suggested Caillaux had behaved dishonourably; they had further letters, said to be ‘intimate’, that they would not rule out publishing. The gunshots were the revenge of an insulted woman defending her husband’s honour, as though in a duel. The late Gaston Calmette had become editor twenty years earlier when still in his thirties; he was admired for his tactful intelligence and had recently been the dedicatee of a book by a young writer named Marcel Proust. Madame Caillaux had made no attempt to escape the scene of the crime, though had insisted on being driven to the police station by her own chauffeur.

‘I don’t want to go,’ said Anton.

‘But you must,’ said Delphine. ‘It’s an honour to be sent.’

‘It’s just another French scandal. Sex and corruption and—’

‘You’re the victim of your success, my love. When you went to Paris and you wrote so beautifully about it …’

‘No, I was trying to prove they were in league with the English. Illegally.’

‘Yes, but you wrote another article, too, about how the new boulevards had destroyed the old neighbourhoods of Paris. When you went to write about the Mona Lisa.’

‘I didn’t think anyone had read that.’

‘I looked up the back numbers.’