I got along well with her two children who were slogging away, like me, to pay for the costs of that wretched establishment. Poor things, they had not one, but two institutionalized parents. A mother with Alzheimer’s and a bedridden father. The cost of the whole exercise? More than 6,500 euros a month for this 20th-arrondissement institution that really had nothing luxurious about it whatsoever.

The carers, once they had settled everybody else on the floor, would then set about capturing the wanderer so they could undress her and force her into bed. Strapped in, she would cry out, calling for help, railing against her confinement . . . It was at that particularly ghastly moment that I would choose to clear out.

But one day in April, Madame Léger escaped.

I was the first to notice. Having been left to laze around on my couch with complete impunity, I asked one of the cleaning ladies, between sobs, if something had happened to her.

“You’re right, yes, where has she got to, that Madame Léger?” came the response from the kindly African woman with her Ivory Coast accent you could cut with a knife. She immediately sounded the alert and all the staff set off to look for her. Every room and all the common areas were methodically searched, in vain. No more Madame Léger. She had made a dash for it, ripping off her wander-control device like the raptor in Jurassic Park.

The brain of an Alzheimer sufferer can be likened to an onion that will rot layer by layer, from the outside in. The desire for freedom is hidden deep in the centre, at the core, I said to myself as I made my way through the hubbub provoked by her disappearance.

The next day, while listening to the conversation between Afid’s mother and her son on the halal line, I heard the exact same story coming straight from her mouth.

I already knew she was a carer in an aged care facility in Paris, but not in a million years had I imagined that fate could have landed her at Les Eoliades, at the bedside of my very own mother.

It took me a good week to identify her, given that in all these old people’s homes, like in the hospitals and child-care centres, practically the only people working there are Blacks and Arabs. Racists everywhere, know this — the first and last person who will spoon-feed you and wash your intimate parts is a woman you despise!

I recognized her by the fact that at 6:55 p.m., whatever else was going on, she would shut herself up in the plant room to take her son’s call — a call whose timed and date-stamped file I would receive the following day.