What has changed us? The chocolates, of course; I know that my hand-made truffles are far better than anything out of a factory. The décor, too, is more welcoming; and with Zozie here to help me, there is time to sit and talk awhile.

Montmartre is a village within the city – and remains deeply if dubiously nostalgic with its narrow streets and old cafés and country-style cottages, complete with summer whitewash and fake shutters at the windows and bright geraniums in their terracotta pots. To the folk of Montmartre, marooned above a Paris simmering with change, it sometimes feels like the last village; a fleeting fragment of a time when things were sweeter and simpler; when doors were always left unlocked and any ills and injuries could be cured with a square of chocolate—

It’s all an illusion, I’m afraid. For most people here, those times never existed. They live in a world of part-fantasy, where the past is so deeply buried beneath wishful thinking and regret that they have almost come to believe their own fiction.

Look at Laurent, who speaks so bitterly against immigrants, but whose father was a Polish Jew who fled to Paris during the war, changed his name, married a local girl and became Gustave Jean-Marie Pinson, Frencher than the French, sound as the stones of the Sacré-Coeur.

He does not speak of it, of course. But Zozie knows – he must have told her. And Madame Pinot, with her silver crucifix and her tight-lipped disapproving smile and shop window full of plaster saints—

She was never a Madame in her life. In her younger days (so says Laurent, who knows these things), she was a cabaret dancer at the Moulin Rouge, and would sometimes perform in a nun’s wimple, high heels and a black satin corset so tight it would make your eyes water – hardly what you’d expect of a seller of religious memorabilia, and yet—

Even our handsome Jean-Louis and Paupaul, who work the Place du Tertre with such expertise, seducing the ladies into parting with their money with swashbuckling compliments and broad innuendo. You’d think at least they were what they seemed. But neither one has ever set foot in a gallery, or been to art school, and for all their masculine appeal, both of them are quietly though sincerely gay, and are planning a civil ceremony – perhaps in San Francisco, where such things are more common and less harshly judged.

So says Zozie, who seems to know everything. Anouk, too, knows more than she tells me, and I find myself increasingly worrying about her. She used to tell me everything. But recently, she has grown restless and secretive; hiding for hours at a time in her room, spending most of her weekends in the cemetery with Jean-Loup, and her evenings talking with Zozie.