Throughout her life, she didn’t buy a single truly personal item; only clothes, perfume and makeup. In the mornings she would spend hours dolling herself up and examining herself soberly in the mirror; then she would plonk herself down in her flouncy dress, looking badly miscast against the medieval-style decor opted for by my father according to the principle: if it’s old, it must be tasteful . . .

There she would smoke her Gallias and read novels that were an infinitely repetitive variation on the same theme: a Jewish woman leaves Austria, Poland or Russia, disembarking, bare foot, at the base of the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island, and thanks to her cunning nature, her ass, her good fortune, becomes a famous publisher, a renowned fashion designer, a feared lawyer . . . This Jewish female bulldozer crushes everything in her path, men in particular. Her children loathe her. She dies alone, but widely envied and very rich.

And my mother, sitting on a kneeler that had been turned into a chair, illuminated by a helmet that had been turned into a lamp, would anxiously light up her Gallias in rhythm with the peregrinations of her Jewish heroine, interrupting her reading with little untranslatable exclamations.

My father — who incidentally was on first-name terms with every prostitute from around the Church of the Madeleine — would gaze proudly at her, and pronounce her like a work of art: very beautiful, but in terms of her usefulness, absolutely worthless.

Was it for him that she spent so much time preparing herself in the morning? She liked to say so, but it was a lie because he was almost always travelling for work. No, the truth is that she didn’t love anybody.

If my mother was wrapping herself in clothes of coloured silk and the lives of intrepid Jewish women, it was so she could stand every morning on the bridge of an imaginary cruise ship, headed for the paradise to where she would have liked to emigrate after the war — Miami Beach, the city of pastel colours and buildings shaped like Italian cassatas; the city where the Ashkenazis dance day and night to Paul Anka.

Since that never came to pass, she smothered her desire in the uniformity of her days, waiting patiently for the holidays as she read her novels and smoked her Gallia cigarettes.

Towards the end, before she had her stroke, she used to spend her time scrounging money off me to buy clothes at Printemps or Galeries Lafayette and returning them the next day with the good-natured complicity of the sales assistants. “Mademoiselle, I’ll just leave it on,” she used to say regally, having made the purchase; then she would go down to be sprayed with perfume on the ground floor before finishing her day at the Café de la Paix eating enormous cakes with her serviette spread out over her entire body so as not to spill on herself.