Damn him, I thought. What’s wrong with me? I look like Vianne, I talk like Vianne – he should have been a pushover. But some people are just tougher than others, and my timing so far has been all wrong. Still, I can wait – for a few days, at least. And if glamours won’t work, then chemicals will.

Today I waited for closing-time impatiently, with an eye to the clock. It seemed to me like a very long day, but I spent it pleasantly enough, while outside the rain turned slowly to mist and the people went by like folk in a dream, occasionally stopping to stare blurrily at the half-finished window display that shines out now from Le Rocher de Montmartre like a magic-lantern show.

Never underestimate the power of a window display. The eyes are the windows of the soul, they say, and a display window should be the eyes of the shop, gleaming with promise and delight. The old display was pretty enough, with my red shoes filled with chocolates, but I’m aware that with Christmas approaching in giant strides, we must think of something more enchanting than mere footwear if we are to bring the customers in.

And so our window has become an Advent calendar, draped with scrap silk and lit with a single yellow lantern. The calendar itself is made out of an antique dolls’ house that I found in the marché aux puces. Too old to attract a child, too decrepit to be of any interest to a collector – its roof badly glued together, its front cracked and mended with masking tape – it was precisely what I had been looking for.

It is large – large enough to fill the window – with a sloping, bevelled roof and a painted façade with four lift-out panels to spy inside. For the present, all the panels are shut, and I have placed blinds in the windows, under which we can just glimpse the comforting golden light from inside.

‘Wow,’ said Vianne when she saw me at work. ‘What is it, a Nativity?’

I grinned. ‘Not quite. It’s a surprise.’

So today I worked as fast as I could, shielding the window from prying eyes with the help of a large piece of red-and-gold sari silk behind which the transformation was to occur.

I started with the scenery. Around the house, I constructed a miniature garden: a lake made from a swatch of blue silk with chocolate ducks floating across it; a river; a path made from coloured sugar crystals, lined with trees and bushes made from tissue paper and pipe-cleaners; everything dusted with icing-sugar snow, and with multicoloured sugar mice running out of the Advent house like something out of a fairytale . . .