“Listen, I’m fine . . . Let’s spend a quiet evening watching TV . . . We can even watch the French channel if you want a giggle . . .”

Which we did. We sat there convulsed and appalled by the vulgar comedians; we sneered at the two-week-old news reports read by an announcer in thick pancake makeup that made him look embalmed; we shrieked at the first frames of yet another film describing the daily lives of peasants in minute detail (one sequence, nine minutes long by the clock, showed them peeling potatoes while exchanging inane remarks in a hilarious accent) the plot of which— another super-highway that was going to devastate the ­lovely landscape—was terminally boring.

It was Mathieu who had introduced me to this particular vice and I was starting to find it addictive. The French TV station that broadcasts in Quebec, marriage of a glaring lack of need and a shameful auto-colonialism, lost in the midst of the girly shows, shootouts, American quiz shows, sob stories, flops, false starts and acts of contrition of our own television, came across as a dotty granny who warms herself by the fire and makes other people happy by setting herself up as a laughing-stock. Naughty or nice. That night it was naughty, and we had a good laugh.

Before I met Mathieu I used to waste my time with the community TV channels, an endless source of cheap thrills with their televised macramé or crochet lessons given by well-meaning but hilarious ladies. Now, though, my boyfriend had gradually been introducing me to the pernicious pleasure of game shows like the “Jeux de vingt heures” whose lack of rhythm was equalled only by the total vapidity of the questions, or “Des chiffres et des lettres,” which managed to make fifteen minutes seem like two hours of punishment.

Then, around midnight, came the inevitable Saturday night horror film. We huddled together, putting our intelligence, our sensitivity and all our critical faculties on hold, and were appropriately terrified when the girl went down to the cellar in search of the ancient trunk left to her by her old aunt, and when the guy opened the trap to the furnace that was the hiding place for the wicked little monsters who went running all over the house at night, killing off its inhabitants one by one, and at the end when the little ­monsters took over the sleeping city the next morning, after devouring the whole household. A great moment in ­cinema.

We didn’t talk about Sébastien again. As far as I was ­concerned I didn’t even want to think about the fact that he’d still be there the next morning, so cute but so present, and above all so demanding. I was used to cozy Sunday mornings; I had the feeling this one would be very ­different.