Nicole placed both her palms flat on the table decisively. “Maisie, we need to solve this problem. I can see now I have not done enough since you arrived in Paris to expand your vision and feed your creative spirit. You are young, and it is only natural that you lack the historical perspective the older pupils in your class possess. To develop your art in the contemporary way Augustin wishes you to do, you should be exposed to the galleries here where all the best examples of those kinds of work are held. Tomorrow, Françoise will take you to the Pompidou Centre and the Louvre. The famous artists you see hung on the walls there may inspire you to progress in your own art.”

“The Pompidou and the Louvre?” Françoise groaned. “Maman! There will be queues of tourists for miles!”

“Do you want to help Maisie or not?” Nicole replied. “Then get out the door by nine and you two will be at the front of the queue before anyone else has had their morning coffee!”

***

“Maisie! Wake up, we are late already!” Françoise was at my door the next morning at nine, yawning and still in her pyjamas. We dressed in haste to make up lost time but by the time we’d had croissants and hot chocolate it was almost ten. We walked briskly through the streets towards the Pompidou Centre. “Come on!” Françoise kept coaxing me to go faster. “The crowds, oh the crowds!”

The Pompidou already had a queue when we arrived. The building looked like a spaceship – covered with weird plastic test tubes housing the escalators to the different levels.

As we swept from floor to floor, I tried hard to take it all in as Françoise led the charge through art eras from the surrealists, to cubists and postmodernists.

In the Dadaist wing, Françoise pointed out the painting of the Mona Lisa with a moustache drawn on her. “That is Duchamp. And that is too, and that one,” she pointed at a urinal sitting in the middle of the room.

“Is that a toilet?” I said.

“No.” Françoise looked at me like I was stupid. “It’s art.”

“This is why Augustin and I are never ever going to understand each other,” I grumbled to Françoise.

“This is too modern for you, I think.” Françoise shrugged. “You’ll like the Louvre better. It’s full of the old stuff.”

To get inside the Louvre you had to enter through a big glass pyramid. Once we were inside we had to queue for an hour to see the real Mona Lisa – which looked just like the one at the Pompidou with the moustache only now there was no moustache, so that was a waste of time.