We managed to get a seat on the terrace of the P’tit Café. Some people had just vacated a table in the front row, an amazing stroke of luck at that hour of the night. Two ­coffees, half-drunk and half-spilled, were cooling on the painted tin table. The ashtray was full of butts that turned my stomach. I’m a non-smoker, not quite a fascist but ­fairly intolerant. During the seventies I stopped smoking even my trademark pipe, and I’ve felt so much better ever since that I find myself a little too often hoping to persuade other people to give it up. But I restrain myself. I was a smoker long enough to know how tiresome a non-smoker with an acute case of proselytism can be. So I merely pushed the ashtray away, discreetly I hoped.

Mathieu, who had just taken a package of cigarettes from his pocket, hesitated.

“Will it bother you if I smoke?”

“Not unless you blow it in my face.”

He frowned, then put them back in his pocket.

“I was kidding, Mathieu. Smoke all you want.”

We had left a crowded place in search of peace and here we were in the midst of a crowd that wasn’t too noisy but was still very much there. Since we were at the front, handbags kept brushing against us and we could overhear scraps of conversation that sounded very silly out of context: “So I said, I said . . . ,” “so big it wouldn’t go in . . . ,” “American Express cheques. It hit her so hard she came straight home,” and I could see the moment approaching when some rubby was going to come over and bum a cigarette, or change “for the Métro.” The waiter appeared, starchy and unctuous. I hadn’t even looked at the menu. I ordered a mineral water, to make a good impression but also because I knew I’d had enough to drink. Then the waiter recognized Mathieu and suddenly he was all smiles, batting his eyelashes like a twenties starlet.

“Mathieu! Haven’t seen you around for a while.”

Mathieu seemed reluctant to talk to him, as if he didn’t want me to know they were acquainted.

“I’m hardly ever in this part of town . . . I wasn’t even intending to go to La Cachette tonight . . .”

“Your friend, you know, the one that’s on TV . . . He was in a while ago . . . Seemed to be looking for somebody.”

Mathieu was visibly annoyed at the waiter’s familiarity. I found it amusing.

“It wasn’t me . . . I don’t see him any more . . . Once was enough, thank you very much!”