Accidents happen when she’s around. Like the Murano dish that I could swear was broken, though now I’m not sure at all. Or the lights that sometimes switch on and off, even when there’s no one there. Of course, that might simply be the eccentric wiring of a very old house. I may have imagined the rest of it. Then again, may and might never made a wrong thing right, as my mother used to say, and I’m not in the habit of imagining things.

The past few days have been busy for us. A bustle of cleaning, restructuring and ordering of stock, with all Yanne’s copper pans and moulds and ceramics to bring out of storage – in spite of her careful packing many of the pans were tarnished and spotted with verdigris, and as I looked after the front of the shop, Yanne spent hours in the kitchen, polishing and cleaning until at last every piece was done.

‘It’s only for fun,’ she keeps saying, as if slightly ashamed of her enjoyment, as of some childish habit she should have outgrown. ‘It’s not really serious, you know.’

Well, it looks serious enough from where I’m standing. No game could be so meticulously planned.

She buys only the best couverture, from a fair trade supplier down near Marseille, and pays for it all in cash. A dozen blocks of each kind, to begin with, she says; but I already know from her eager response that a dozen blocks will not be enough. She used to make all her own stock, so she tells me, and though I’ll admit I didn’t quite believe it at first, the way she has thrown herself back into the business tells me that she was not exaggerating.

The process is deft and peculiarly therapeutic to watch. First comes the melting and tempering of the raw couverture: that process which enables it to leave its crystalline state and take on the glossy, malleable form necessary to make the chocolate truffles. She does it all on a granite slab, spreading out the melted chocolate like silk and gathering it back towards her using a spatula. Then it goes back into the warm copper, the process to be repeated until she declares it done.

She rarely uses the sugar thermometer. She has been making chocolates for so long, she tells me, that she can simply sense when the correct temperature has been reached. I believe her; certainly over the past three days I have been watching her, she has never produced a less than flawless batch. During that time I have learnt to observe with a critical eye: to check for streaks in the finished product; for the unappealing pale bloom that denotes incorrectly tempered chocolate; for the high gloss and sharp snap that are the indicators of good-quality work.