I’ve been talking to Zozie a lot lately. She knows what it’s like to be my age, and to be different. Her mother had a shop, she says. Some people didn’t like it much, and once, someone even tried to set it on fire.

‘A bit like what happened to us,’ I said, and then I had to tell her the rest, about how we blew into the village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes at the beginning of Lent, and set up our chocolate shop right in front of the church, and about the curé who hated us, and all our friends, and the river people, and Roux, and Armande who died just the way she had lived, with no regrets and no goodbyes and with the taste of chocolate in her mouth.

I don’t suppose I should have told her all that. But it’s quite hard not to, with Zozie. And anyway, she works for us. She’s on our side. She understands.

‘I hated school,’ she told me yesterday. ‘I hated the kids and the teachers too. All those people who thought I was a freak, and who wouldn’t sit with me because of the herbs and stuff Mum used to put into my pockets. Asafoetida – God, that’s rank – and patchouli because it’s supposed to be spiritual, and dragon’s blood, that gets everywhere and leaves these red stains— And so the other kids used to laugh at me, and say I’d got nits, and say I smelt. And even the teachers got drawn in, and one woman – Mrs Fuller, she was called – gave me a talk about personal hygiene . . .’

‘That’s rotten!’

She grinned. ‘I paid them back.’

‘How?’

‘Another time, perhaps. The point is, Nanou, that for a long time I thought it was my fault. That I really was a freak, and I’d never amount to anything.’

‘But you’re so clever – and besides, you’re gorgeous.’

‘I didn’t feel clever or gorgeous then. I never felt good enough, or clean enough, or nice enough for them. I never bothered to do any work. I just assumed everyone was better than me. I talked to Mindy all the time—’

‘Your invisible friend—’

‘And of course, people laughed. Though by then it hardly mattered what I did. They’d have laughed at me anyway.’

She stopped talking, and I looked at her, trying to imagine her in those days. Trying to imagine her without her confidence, her beauty, her style . . .

‘The thing about beauty,’ Zozie said, ‘is that actually it doesn’t have much to do with looks at all. It’s not about the colour of your hair, or your size, or your shape. It’s all in here.’ She tapped her head. ‘It’s how you walk, and talk, and think – and whether you walk about like this—’