One month later, I stood with my bags at Charles de Gaulle airport, being pushed this way and that as people hustled by me, surging through the arrivals terminal. I was in Paris! All. By. Myself.

And for a brief moment, standing there in the terminal, I felt entirely and utterly alone and completely terrified. And then, it was as if the crowds parted in front of me by magic and through the throng came Nicole Bonifait. Her flame-red hair was loose and bouncing on her shoulders as she hurried towards me.

“Welcome to Paris, Maisie,” she said warmly as she grabbed my bags from the trolley. “Your life as an artist begins here and now.”

***

We drove into the city round the Arc de Triomphe, and through the tinted windows of Nicole’s black Renault with its own chauffeur I caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Then we were whizzing along the broad avenues that run alongside the Seine and crossing over the river. I looked out of the window at pink horse-chestnut trees in bloom, and elegant cafés on every corner and felt like I was in a movie. Paris!

“This is the Left Bank,” Nicole explained. “The artists’ side of the city. The most famous names all went to art school here: Matisse, Picasso and Renoir, and Rose of course. That café on your left? Les Deux Magots? It was Rose’s favourite. Always filled with painters, talking and eating and drinking.”

Nicole saw the worried look on my face.

“Is there something wrong, Maisie?”

“I feel like I’m going to let you down,” I said. “I’m not a real artist.”

Nicole laughed. “But of course you are! You’re the chosen one, Maisie! You follow in the footsteps of the great Rose Bonifait herself. Your scholarship bears her name and her world is now yours. Even the rooms that you will live in while you are here in Paris are the same ones that Rose herself occupied when she attended the school.”

A block down from Les Deux Magots café we pulled up outside a branch of the most famous cake shop in Paris, Ladurée. I got out of the car and gazed in through the gilt-trimmed windows of the store at a display of rainbow-coloured macarons, little meringues stacked up as if they were precious jewels. We swept past its pretty windows and went in through the doors of the building, into a tiny foyer, which housed an ancient elevator. Nicole ushered me in and slammed the gold doors closed without waiting for the driver. “He’ll follow us up with the bags,” she assured me as she pressed the button for the top floor.

The elevator rose and I watched the floor numbers whizz by as we went up, up, up. “The Bonifait corporation owns the entire building,” Nicole explained. “Most of the levels are offices these days, but the upper level remains our family home …”