WHILST WAITING FOR my cherries to ripen, I have managed to collect a certain amount of local knowledge on the inhabitants of Place des Faux-Monnayeurs. Madame Pinot, the little partridge of a woman who runs the newsagent-souvenir-bric-a-brac shop, has a busy mouth for gossip, and has acquainted me with the neighbourhood through her eyes.

Through her I know that Laurent Pinson frequents the singles bars, that the fat young man from the Italian restaurant weighs over three hundred pounds but still goes into the chocolaterie at least twice a week, and that the woman with the dog who passes every Thursday at ten o’clock is Madame Luzeron, whose husband had a stroke last year and whose son died when he was thirteen. Every Thursday she goes to the cemetery, says Madame Pinot, with that silly little dog in tow. Never misses. Poor old thing.

‘What about the chocolaterie?’ I asked, selecting Paris-Match (I hate Paris-Match) from a small shelf of magazines. Above and below the magazines there are colourful displays of religious tat: plaster Virgins, cheap ceramics; snow-globes of the Sacré-Coeur; medallions; crucifixes; rosaries; incense for all occasions. I suspect Madame may be a prude; she looked at the cover of my magazine (which shows Princess Stephanie of Monaco, bikinied and cavorting blurrily on some beach somewhere), and pulled a face like the back end of a turkey.

‘Not much to say, really,’ she said. ‘Husband died down south somewhere. But she’s fallen on her feet all right.’ The busy mouth puckered again. ‘I reckon there’ll be a wedding before long.’

‘Really?’

She nodded. ‘Thierry le Tresset. He owns the place. Let it out cheap to Madame Poussin because she was some kind of friend of the family. That’s where he met Madame Charbonneau. And if ever I saw a man head-over-heels—’ She rang up the magazine on the till. ‘Still, I wonder if he knows what he’s taking on. She must be twenty years younger than he is – and he’s always away on business, and her with two kids, one of them special—’

‘Special?’ I said.

‘Oh, haven’t you heard? Poor little thing. That’s got to be a burden for anyone – and if that wasn’t bad enough,’ she said, ‘you’re not telling me the shop makes much of a profit, what with the overheads, and the heating, and the rent—’

I let her talk for a little while. Gossip is currency to people like Madame, and I sense that I have already given her much to think about. With my pink-streaked hair and scarlet shoes I too must be a promising source of tittle-tattle. I left the shop with a cheery goodbye and the sense that I’d made a good start, and returned to my place of employment.