He blew his nose in his napkin, then realized what he’d done and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. “Did she keep the child?”

“Obviously.”

“Are you on good terms?”

‘’Yes, better now . . . It’s been two years, so things have ­settled down. I see the boy as much as I want.”

He moved his plate back, fiddled with his beets, then pushed it away again with a sigh.

“And I was so hungry . . .”

“Yeah, come on, you should eat.”

“I’ve got a lump in my throat . . .”

“You’ve never talked to anybody about this?”

“Who? For sure not my mother, even if she suspects. And the guys you meet, you know as well as I do, you don’t ­exactly want to trust them with the story of your life.”

The waiter came for our plates. Mathieu handed him the napkin and asked for another. I watched regretfully as the crudités vanished into the kitchen. Nothing, absolutely ­nothing could stop me from eating: what Mathieu was telling me had no effect whatever on my appetite and I would have gladly helped myself from his plate, but under the circumstances I didn’t think I should.

Mathieu lit a cigarette, after asking if it bothered me.

“Maybe I should cancel the rest of my dinner . . .”

He was very upset; his eyes, his beautiful black eyes, shone in the orange light of the setting sun. I wanted to get up and take in my arms to console him for those two years of enforced silence.

“Excuse me for coming back to it, Mathieu, but didn’t you know you were gay when you got married?”

He gave me a helpless little smile before replying. “I’ve asked myself a hundred times, as you can imagine . . . As far as I was concerned I was straight . . . I swear, I was positive . . . I’d never had any problems with girls . . . It was very good with Louise . . . That’s . . . my wife. I won’t tell you how it ­happened, it’s so banal . . . But anyway it happened, and it turned my life inside out. I was so far from being ready for it, you can’t imagine . . . It was like changing my skin, my personality, my whole life . . . Overnight everything changed, absolutely everything, without my wanting it! Can you understand? I wasn’t like some guys or girls who hesitate for years, it had never crossed my mind! My first ­experiences were . . . fantastic, Jean-Marc, and that made up my mind. But there was no way I was going to go on living my little domestic life alongside, as if nothing had changed, I can’t . . . I can’t cheat. That’s something that has to be clear in my life and I couldn’t live with . . . with that weight, that shadow . . .”