From the opposite side of the street, he studies the five-storey limestone building that matches the address a lady at the housing office scribbled on a piece of paper. He’s been trying to move out of his student digs for weeks and this looks like as good a place as any. When he saw the notice of a room for rent tacked to a corkboard, his spirits lifted. Not only is he paying far too much for his tiny quarters in student housing, a cloud of depression hangs over him like a fog every time he enters the windowless room, no bigger than a monk’s cell. At times he thinks he might die in there. His body rotting for months before being discovered.

This neighbourhood, on the other side of the Jardin du Luxembourg, is one of his favourite haunts. A new start after a rocky beginning. In the mornings, he could take the Métro to Odéon to attend his lectures and then walk back through the avenues of towering lindens and chestnut trees in the park, stripped of their leaves with the approach of winter, but in the spring, in dappled sunshine, it would be a delight to stroll beneath the rustling boughs.

He rings the bell and waits on the pavement until he is buzzed in. A woman with a tarnished brooch pinned to the lace collar of her black dress stands in the doorway of the anteroom. When he shows her the paper from the Sorbonne housing office, she gives him a suspicious look, but allows him to proceed to the back stairs, craning her neck to observe him as he makes his way to the second floor.

Before he can knock, the door swings open and a woman in a dark green dress and flowered apron greets him with a smile. ‘Are you the boy from the Sorbonne, the one looking for a room?’ He nods, and she beckons him inside. ‘It’s at the back of the flat.’ She leads him through the front room where two girls are bent over their schoolbooks. Another, older girl is in the kitchen, stirring something in a pot with a long-handled spoon. ‘These are three of my daughters,’ the woman says, nodding at the girls. ‘My two youngest daughters are very studious.’ She smiles. ‘Always with their noses in a book.’