Which brings me to fireworks . . . When those sprays of incandescent chrysanthemums appear in the sky, I experience a coloured emotion so profoundly vivid that I’m simultaneously saturated with joy and replete. Like an orgasm.

Collecting fireworks . . . It would feel like being at the centre of a gigantic gang bang with the entire universe.

As for Portefeux . . . well, that’s my husband’s name. The man who protected me for a while from the cruelty of the world and who granted me a life of delights and satisfied desires. For those marvellous years we were married, he loved me as I was, with my chromatic sexuality, my passion for Rothko, my lolly-pink dresses and my complete lack of practicality rivalled only by my mother’s.

We began our conjugal life in magnificent apartments, rented with the fruit of his labour. I say rented deliberately — as in creditor-protected — because like my father, my husband did business of an unspecified nature that nobody knew anything about except insofar as it afforded us a significant degree of material comfort. It never occurred to people to interrogate him on the subject, such was his generosity, his breeding, the seriousness of his manner.

He, too, made his money thanks to the so-called shit-hole countries of the world, offering consulting services for the development of national lottery systems. In short, he sold his expertise in the French system, the Pari Mutuel Urbain, to the leaders of African nations or Central Asian countries like Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan. You can picture the scene. I personally became very familiar with that end-of-the-road ambiance, over numerous stays in improbable international hotels, both with him and with my own family. They were the only places where the air-conditioning worked and the alcohol was decent, where mercenaries rubbed shoulders with journalists, businessmen and criminals on the run, and the peaceful ennui in the bar lent itself to lazy chit-chat. Not so different, for those in the know, to the cottonwool atmosphere of the common areas in psychiatric hospitals or in the spy novels of Gérard de Villiers.

We met in Muscat, in the sultanate of Oman; the same place he died as we celebrated our seven-year wedding anniversary.

At breakfast, the morning after our first night together, without even realizing what he was doing, he buttered my toast to look like my favourite painting. A rectangle of toast, half covered with strawberry jam, plain butter on a quarter of the remaining surface, and, finally, orange marmalade spread to the very edge. White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) by Rothko.

Unbelievable, right?

When I married him, I thought I would lead a carefree life of love forever. I hadn’t the slightest inkling that anything as dreadful as an aneurism in mid-belly laugh could lie in store. But that’s how he died, opposite me, at the age of thirty-four, at the Grand Hyatt in Muscat.