‘If you like. But you don’t have to. We could start with any period of your life.’

She looked slightly lost at this. She wanted me to guide her through the labyrinth of her past. But just as I was about to begin questioning her, she turned to look at a small framed photograph.

‘We could talk about René, my husband,’ she said. ‘He died a long time ago … So he’d like it if we talked about him first.’

‘Ah, okay …’ I replied, noting that in addition to all my living readers, I now also had to please the dead.

6

Madeleine took a deep breath, like a diver, as if her memories were hiding somewhere at the bottom of the sea. And she started to talk. She’d met René in the late sixties, at a Bastille Day party held in a fire station. She and a friend of hers had gone to the party in search of some handsome hunk they could dance with. But it was a rather puny man who approached her. Madeleine immediately warmed to him. She sensed he was not the kind of man who was in the habit of chatting up strange girls. And she was right. He must have felt something rare, in his body or his heart, to have dared approach her like that.

René told her later the reasons for his attraction. According to him, she looked exactly like the actress Michèle Alfa. Just like me, Madeleine had never heard of Michèle Alfa. It was true that she didn’t make many films after the war. When she found the actress’s photograph in a magazine, young Madeleine was surprised: there was only a vague resemblance. At most, you could describe the two women as being slightly similar. But for René, Madeleine was practically Michèle Alfa’s double. The source of his emotion went much further back, to a terrifying episode from his childhood. During the war, his mother had been part of a Resistance network. Pursued by the Milice, she had hidden her young son in a cinema.² Poor, frightened René had clung to the faces on the screen, and Michèle Alfa’s became, for him, an unforgettably reassuring image. So it was that, over twenty years later, he glimpsed the ghost of his protector in the eyes of a woman at a firemen’s ball. Madeleine asked him the title of the film. L’aventure est au coin de la rue, he replied: Adventure awaits at the corner of the street. I was stunned but tried not to show it. The title seemed to nod uncannily to the concept behind my new book.

Madeleine had been thirty-three at the time. All her female friends were already married with children. She thought perhaps it was time for her to ‘settle down’ too. She explained that she was using this expression – ‘se ranger’ – with reference to the title of Simone de Beauvoir’s book Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, which had been published in the years prior to her encounter with René. She didn’t want to disrespect her husband’s memory but preferred to be straightforward with me: at the time she had been motivated more by reason than by passion. It was nice and reassuring to be loved by a man who was so sure of his feelings for her; so nice that she was able to forget the truth of her own feelings. Over time, René’s kindness and consideration won her heart and in the end there could be no doubt: Madeleine loved him. But she never felt for him the devastating rapture she had felt for her first love.