A perceptive one, young Mathieu. I’ve met so many of those actors or pseudo-actors, megalomaniacs most of them, who string you a line about their so-called career or their hypothetical future, that now I really can’t take any of them. Suddenly, I wanted to be far away. I was looking him straight in the eye as he spoke and I wanted to be somewhere else. I knew it was silly, because he was a nice guy who didn’t seem to have any illusions about himself or to be trying to impress me, but I recalled some past ­experiences—Claude, Michel, Luc in particular who has a little mini-career on TV now, but who talks about himself as if he were the Québécois James Dean—and I wanted to get the hell out.

As he talked, Mathieu’s tone became more and more ­confidential. As if he were opening up to a friend. I should have been touched, but I was scared.

“Since I left the children’s theatre company I haven’t been doing much . . . Little things now and then. Bit parts, the odd commercial. If you’ve only worked for kids and you haven’t gone to theatre school it doesn’t help your reputation much. But I’m patient. You never know when the right person’s going to turn up.”

He stopped talking for a moment.

“Are you listening?”

I nearly jumped.

“Yes, sure, I’m listening . . . You’re right, I’m sure it can’t be easy.”

He finished his lemon pie in silence as I watched the passing scene. I wished I’d been more tactful but if I hadn’t stopped myself I’d have got up and left without a word, ­leaving him there with his crumb-strewn plate and his half-drunk glass of milk.

“Do you like being a French teacher?”

Once again, as when he’d asked my age, the words came out before I had a chance to think about them.

“No, I don’t.”

“You don’t look like a French teacher to me. Anyway, you don’t talk like the ones I had in CEGEP. You know the type, they sound like defrocked priests or Outremont matrons from the fifties . . .”

I felt like telling him that Outremont had changed a lot and its matrons aren’t what they used to be, but that would have led us straight into where-do-you-live, do-you-live-alone and all the rest, and I didn’t feel like going there.

When he realized that I wasn’t going to return his attempts at confidences, he started to talk about himself again and that brought the conversation to an end.

“I take singing lessons too. I don’t know if I could ever become a singer: probably not, but I love it . . .”