I took my time and pretended to examine each photo in detail so I could observe my cousin on the sly. Teetering on 20-centimetre high heels with an artfully dishevelled haircut, she had the sickly, bowlegged look of a forty-year-old woman who’s starving herself, with the pit-of-the-stomach breath to match. She swept the space with a bored look – what the fuck am I even doing here – an e-cigarette in her mouth emitting a thick Tagada-brand strawberry-flavoured vapour, and her gaze passed over me as if I were a table, a chair or, better yet, a dustbin.

When Hildegarde and Juliette had had enough of torturing the dog photographer at his stand, they came looking for me at my cousin’s.

‘Did you see, Tata? That lady, she has the same name as us!’

‘Oh, so she does!’ confirmed Hildegarde. ‘Come here, you, they’re not pictures for a little girl like you.’

Like a duchess sizing up a cockroach, Adrienne grimaced in disgust as she looked at Juliette, then with a push detached herself from the wall, telling her gallerist in a weary tone that she was going to take a look around.

We spent a little more time looking at photos of poor people, then before we left I went to the bathroom: an enormous echoey room with a very high ceiling, tucked away at the back of the Grand Palais, with the obligatory black woman lurking in a corner, flanked by her cleaning cart.

While I was busy doing a wee, I heard an enormous gassy noise from the other end of the room, followed by a torrent of crap splashing into the basin.

‘Yeah . . . It’s me, yeah . . . No, not a soul . . . Apart from two retard dykes and their moronic kid . . . yeah, and it’s my stand they have to end up at . . . Stress . . . No, really, nobody!’

Sound of the door. Sound of the tap. No sound of the flush.

‘Yeah . . . I told you the comms guy was an idiot . . . Yeah, I did tell you . . .’

Where do they teach you this sort of arrogance, which signals to the whole world that you think you’re better than them? Is it genetic, or do they teach it in your second foreign-language class in one of those private schools for people who are loaded? When I hear people talking like that, I can’t help thinking about that comeback from de Funès to Montand in the film La Folie des Grandeurs: ‘Don’t ever apologise. Poor people apologise. If you’re rich, you’re unpleasant, that’s what you are!’

The strawberry-scented vape aroma, enhanced by the poisonous odour of Adrienne de Rigny’s diarrhoea, almost made me retch as it reached me.

I pulled up my tights and headed over to the cubicle which I’d heard her emerge from; indeed, she had not flushed and the toilet bowl was splattered with a constellation of shit all the way up to the lid.