Yesterday we began to redecorate the shop. Another of Zozie’s ideas, not mine, and at first I’d dreaded the disruption, the mess. But with Zozie, Anouk and Rosette helping out, what might have been a chore somehow ended up being a mad kind of game, with Zozie on the ladder painting the walls, her hair tied up in a green scarf and yellow paint all over one side of her face, and Rosette with her toy brush, attacking the furniture, and Anouk stencilling blue flowers and spirals and animal shapes across the wall, and all the chairs out in the sunny street, covered in dust-sheets and speckled with paint.

‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll paint them, too,’ said Zozie when we discovered Rosette’s little hand-prints on an old white kitchen chair. And so Rosette and Anouk made a game of it, with trays of ready-mix poster paint, and when they had finished the chair looked so cheery, with multicoloured hand-prints covering it all over, that we all did the same with the other chairs, and with the small secondhand table that Zozie had bought for the front of the shop.

‘What’s happening? You’re not closing down?’

That was Alice, the blonde girl who drops by almost every week, but hardly ever buys anything. She hardly ever says anything either, but the stacked furniture, the dust-sheets and the multicoloured chairs drying in the street were enough to startle her into speech.

When I laughed she looked almost alarmed, but stopped to admire Rosette’s handiwork (and to accept a home-made truffle on the house, as part of the celebration). She seems quite friendly with Zozie, who has spoken to her once or twice in the shop, and she especially likes Rosette, and knelt beside her on the floor to measure her small hands against Rosette’s smaller, paint-smudged ones.

Then it was Jean-Louis and Paupaul, coming to see what all the fuss was about. Then Richard and Mathurin, the regulars from Le P’tit Pinson. Then Madame Pinot from around the corner, pretending to be on some kind of errand, but darting an eager look over her shoulder at the chaos outside the chocolaterie.

Fat Nico dropped by, and commented with his usual exuberance on the shop’s new look. ‘Hey, yellow and blue! My favourite colours! Was that your idea, Shoe Lady?’

Zozie smiled. ‘We all contributed.’

Actually she was barefoot today, her long, shapely feet gripping the rickety step-ladder. Some of her hair had escaped the scarf; her bare arms were exotically gloved with paint.

‘Looks fun,’ said Nico wistfully. ‘All the little baby-hands.’ He flexed his own hands, which are large and pale and chubby, and his eyes shone. ‘Wish I could try, but I guess you’re all done, hey?’

‘Go ahead,’ I told him, indicating the trays of poster paint.