So many have contributed over the past few days, bringing food, wine, decorations for the Advent house, the Christmas tree itself donated by the florist’s for whom little Alice works; champagne offered by Madame Luzeron; glasses and crockery supplied by Nico’s restaurant; organic meat by Jean-Louis and Paupaul, who paid for it, I suspect, with flattery and a portrait of the supplier’s wife.

Even Laurent brought something (mostly sugar lumps, I’ll admit), and it’s so good to be a community again, to feel included, to be a part of something larger than just the little campfire circle we make for ourselves. I’d always thought Montmartre such a cold place, its people so rude and contemptuous with their Vieux Paris snobbery and their mistrust of strangers. But now I can see there’s a heart behind the cobblestones. Zozie taught me that, at least. Zozie, who plays my part as well as I ever did myself.

There’s a story my mother used to tell. Like all her stories, it’s about herself – a fact I came to realize too late, when the doubts I’d had in the long months leading up to her death became too much for me to ignore, and I went in search of Sylviane Caillou.

What I found confirmed what my mother had said in the delirium of her final days. You choose your family, she said – and she’d chosen me, eighteen months old and somehow hers – like a parcel delivered to the wrong address that she could legitimately claim.

She wouldn’t have cherished you, she’d said. She was careless. She let you go.

But the guilt of it had followed her across continents, a guilt that eventually turned to fear. That was my mother’s real weakness – that fear – and it kept her running all her life. Fear that someone would take me away. Fear that one day I’d learn the truth. Fear that she had been wrong all those years ago, that she had cheated a stranger out of her life, and that in the end she would have to pay—

The story goes like this.

A widow-woman had a daughter whom she cherished above all things. They lived in a cottage in a wood, and though they were poor, they were as happy together as any two people have ever been, before or since.

In fact they were so happy that the Queen of Hearts, who lived nearby, heard of them and was envious, and set out to collect the daughter’s heart, for although she had a thousand lovers and more than a hundred thousand slaves, she was always hungry for more, and she knew that she could never rest knowing that there was a single heart out there that had been given to another.