I deposited my things in my mole-coloured hole so I could go and wander the shopping streets without further ado and buy everything I had always coveted, and which I could finally afford. But I realized very quickly, walking past the jewellers’ and fashion boutiques, that I didn’t feel like any of it. I had barely paused in front of the platinum, gold or caviar-infused anti-aging cream at 600 euros for 300 millilitres, when the sales girl, like a lab assistant in her white coat, appeared: It’s not just a simple anti-aging cream, Madame, it’s an experience. Smearing rare metals or animals on the road to extinction onto my face in order to achieve eternal youth bordered on the stuff of metaphysics . . . You might as well just eat the money — chop it up and make a luxury nutritional supplement, like royal jelly, I thought, making only myself laugh.

In the end, I contented myself with being a so-called “Japanese ant”: that is, with laundering my money by buying four Fancy Vivid Pink 0.5 carat diamonds at 90,000 euros each (to be stored in a lip-stick), as well as a Hermès Kelly bag in red crocodile for the same price, all of which would be resold at auction on my return to Paris. Pink diamonds and brand-name handbags sell like hotcakes, something I knew from my ogling of Parisian auction house sales catalogues. The only personal item I permitted myself was a terribly expensive Italian leather collar for DNA and a matching leash.

After this spot of shopping, I returned to my hotel, alone and silent, and spent my first evening on my balcony, admiring my elegant dog, lost in thought.

My endless summer had not begun at all how I had imagined it.

I was supposed to be overjoyed to be blowing some dough, some moolah, to borrow the language of the intellectuals currently populating my life . . . Yes . . . but buy what, do what? I was certain that not a single one of the young dealers whose conversations I had been translating for almost twenty-five years had had to cope with looking after a vomiting child, or one with braces, or with paying for school trips, or threading cords back through hoodies — or any of the small realities that threaten to drown women in the quicksand of motherhood. Life had run over me, like the iron I had used every evening so my children, despite the shortage of money, always wore impeccable clothes. I had become a bourgeois petite madame, my wings clipped by material preoccupations. And, contrary to what the ads would have us believe, it was not at all clear how you were supposed to alter your behaviour, once all those habits had become ingrained.

I ordered my dinner from room service. It goes without saying that there was no Saint-Gallen sausage on the menu, but instead an oxymoron by the name of Luxury Halal Cuisine.