Juliette, with her usual pugnacity, and taking advantage of the few moments of Tata’s relative lucidity after she had stuffed herself with cake, tried relentlessly, night after night, to extract something more from her.

‘Is his new maman pretty?’ she would ask her, showing her once again the image of a headless Pierre, aged twenty.

In that photo, which was dated February 1968 on the reverse, he was posing next to his late twin sister, Marianne, on a beach at Cannes. It was the last known photo of him in the family album, the next one having simply been ripped out.

‘No, she’s very old.’

‘As old as you?’

‘Older.’

‘So why is there a gap here? What was the photo that used to be there?’

‘That was the one Pierre took to send to her.’

‘Pierre ripped out one of the photos from this album to send to his new mother?’

‘Yes, he’s wicked, he ruined my album.’

This was going to take some work.

One evening when I couldn’t get to sleep, thinking about the time I had discovered the whole de Rigny story by just googling words I’d happened to snatch from a conversation between strangers on a boat, I tried my luck once again by typing in the words ‘mother,’ ‘1968’, ‘old’, ‘sent his photo’.

Page 1:

stuff about pregnancy in older women;

Whatever happened to the girls from May ’68?;

Cameroon: an old dead woman wakes up at her funeral. 68 people trampled;

the progressive integration of the working mother . . . Nothing.

Page 2:

cinema, modelling;

revolution of the older woman;

an extract from a thirteenth-century fable;

a story from BFM News about a seventy-nine-year-old Belgian grandmother caught by speed camera doing 238 kilometres an hour in her Porsche;

Mother’s Agenda, written in French, free e-book.

I clicked on that last hit and was directed to a page suggesting I download the thirteen volumes of the journey of the Mother towards eternal life by way of her yoga of the cells, a record of interviews collated by her disciple, Satprem. The first page of the website showed a photograph of Mother, an extremely old woman with a benevolent smile, who had founded Auroville in 1968, north of Pondicherry, recruiting young people from all over Europe based on their photos, and in particular young people from France, since she, too, was French.

I got up and went to see Tata in her bedroom at the other end of the apartment. On the way I crossed paths with Jelly, the fluorescent rabbit, who went mad every night dashing from one room to the next at full throttle like one of those glow-in-the-dark balls sold by Pakis outside the big department stores.