And so, that evening, I left the Martin family. Yes, I forgot to mention: that is Patrick’s surname. It’s a very common family name in France; I’m not a mathematician so I can’t calculate the odds that I would have ended up talking to someone called Martin, but they had to be pretty short. Usually the characters in my novels have more convoluted names. I particularly like names beginning with K; I always have the impression that a K will help my heroes to be more exciting. So I can’t deny that I found it somewhat worrying to have ended up with a family of Martins. Could I really write a good novel about people called Martin?

To reassure myself, as I took the metro home I typed their full names into a search engine on my phone. I was instantly buried under an avalanche of Patrick Martins and Valérie Martins. I was very happy about this. First of all, it’s an ideal surname if you never want to be found on Facebook. If a psychopath happened to meet a Valérie Martin one evening, he’d have a struggle on his hands to track her down afterwards. People named Martin have the power of anonymity, which obviously gives them the ability to exist as part of a multitude. They are the Chinese of names. And there is something undeniably novelistic about that.

I wanted to check out a few of my characters’ namesakes. Partly to find out which among them had managed to stand out from the crowd. (What can I say? I’m a curious person.) Among the hundreds of Patrick Martins, the most visible was a big business leader. Not only that but he was vice-president of Medef, the French federation of employers. It was true, I thought: Martin did sound like a leader’s name. The kind of person who could talk fluently about employee savings schemes and planned redundancies. For Valérie Martin, my eye was caught by an osteopath in Verrières-le-Buisson. If you had a slipped disc, what could be more reassuring than a Valérie Martin? Nobody with that name would ever mess up your back. It was also true that Verrières-le-Buisson contributed to this comforting image. Windows-in-the-bush. It was such a cosy name (at least in French). So easy to imagine myself drinking jasmine tea in Valérie Martin’s waiting room … I noted down the address for my next lumbago and then continued my research. For Jérémie Martin, too, there were many applicants to choose from. In the end I selected a regional councillor in south-east France, the council chairwoman’s right-hand man. Clearly, the Martins were a powerful family. Dependable too. ‘Call Jérémie Martin,’ I imagined the chairwoman saying. ‘We have a problem with council houses in Marseille.’ ‘But he’s on holiday …’ ‘I said call him!’ How right she was. Jérémie Martin was exactly the kind of guy who would interrupt his holiday to deal with a crisis at work. He would leave the Balearic Islands right away, with his files under his arm. His wife and three children would accompany him to the airport and wave goodbye to him, their arms moving in astonishingly perfect synchronisation. When he got back to the office, he would tell the chairwoman: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got this.’ And everyone would feel so much better.