Having started life as a small, exclusive perfume house, Maison de Grasse had grown into a multi-national that supplied scents for a huge range of goods from household cleaners, which would be unusable without them, to candles and room sprays. They still created and manufactured the most exclusive perfumes, of course. Many of the larger French companies offset tax liabilities by becoming patrons of a museum. Maison de Grasse was following suit in concluding that it would be a prudent blend of fiscal planning and largesse to support a slightly alternative arts project. For Laure, there were sweeteners promised in the form of publicity for the museum and advertising support.

‘Nice, Xavier repeated.

A man totally absorbed by the screen on his phone banged into Laure. She dropped hers and the conversation went dead.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t see you.’

Crystal clear.

Many of Laure’s older memories were anguished and fudged, but what she recorded on first setting eyes on Canal Saint-Martin and the streets spidering out from the ribbon of water were just that: crystal clear.

Ten years ago, it had been run down in places and it was stupid to wander there at night alone. But, here was the thing: the quartier clung to its seductions. Her searches revealed that, in its past, it had seethed with life (some of it pretty low), with sex (bartered or otherwise) and it possessed a unique louche elegance. It was an area that proclaimed to the visitor: I possess an impeccable pedigree, and many of my old buildings have survived revolutions and the destructions of Baron Haussmann. Or something like that. The wording often changed in her head but the gist was the same.

The poor and homeless liked it. As did its long-stayers. So did Laure on the run from her divorce. Listening to the slap of water against the sides of the canal was to feel grounded into the city’s inner life. Likewise, traversing one of the cast-iron footbridges spanning the grey-green, rubbish-speckled water, or tracing the topography of streets with their occasional sinister feel, and she was passionately protective about the just-hanging-on-to-a-living shops and cafes.

That had been then. Recently, an ice-cream shop selling every hue and flavour known to humanity, and an expensive clothes boutique, had arrived, plus a chocolaterie and a salon de beauté. Possibly, her museum had helped the renaissance but now that she had become a true-blooded canaliste, she kept watch over rapacious developers. Unreconstructed it still may be, but the quartier commanded intense loyalty from those who lived there, in a way that modern, sanitized areas possibly did not. Even, as some partisan canalistes argued, the up-itself Left Bank.