Léon Roussel was standing at the half-door of her stall in the stable. He was talking to her with the kind of easy smile on his face that whisked me back to the carefree days before the war came, when we all laughed just with the pleasure of being alive. I recalled that he had always been good with horses, never riding them too hard or driving them over jumps that were too dangerous for them. As I approached, Cosette pawed at the wooden door with her hoof and leaned out to nuzzle my neck and breathe moist air into my face. I was glad the light in the stable was dim because her delight in my return home brought me to tears that I had managed to avoid in front of anyone till now. I ran a hand down her short muscular neck and gently scratched her velvety muzzle. She smelled wonderful.

My father owned about a hundred and fifty Camargue horses that roamed across the landscape in small white herds – though officially termed grey – each one bossed by an unruly handsome stallion. I’d wanted to be one of those stallions as a child, to roam free, to toss my hair and stamp the ground if anyone so much as looked at me the wrong way. They lived semi-wild in the marshland and even gave birth out there. Only the working ones were kept in the stable for the gardians to ride when herding the bulls – even the females were called bulls. Papa possessed more than three hundred black Camargue bulls, but never any Spanish ones like some neighbouring manades. The barking sounds that were uttered by their deep chests and the special musky bull-smell that rose from their dusty hides had formed the backbone of my childhood.

‘Do you still ride?’ I asked Léon. It was like slipping back in time to the days before we forgot how to laugh.

‘No.’ He shook his head with a disparaging smile. ‘I’m a town dweller. I ride a motorcycle instead of a horse.’ He ruffled a hand over one of Cosette’s pricked ears, an elegant snowy white curve with a smoky inner shell. ‘But handlebars don’t sit as well in the hands as a pair of well-used reins.’ He glanced down at my hands, still moving over the horse. ‘And you? I don’t expect there’s much scope for bareback-riding down the Champs-Élysées.’

I gave a token laugh. ‘I didn’t think you’d end up in the gendarmerie, Léon.’

‘And I didn’t think you’d end up a Parisian, Eloïse.’