Having passed the gatekeeper’s lodge, I walked by the administration offices and the staff quarters. Constructed in the mid-sixties, the school buildings were beginning to show their age, but the campus as a whole was still exceptional. The architect had wisely taken advantage of the unique natural setting of the Valbonne plateau. On that Saturday morning, the air was mild, the sky a deep turquoise. Set between scrubland and forest, amid rocky crags and uneven terrain, the concrete, glass, and steel structures merged with the undulating landscape. Farther down, set near the large lake, half hidden by trees, were the small two-story buildings that housed the boarding students, each one painted a different color and bearing the name of an artist associated with the Côte d’Azur: Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Nicolas de Staël, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sidney Bechet, Graham Greene…

Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, I’d lived here with my parents in the staff quarters. My memories of my time here were still vivid, particularly the joy of waking every morning to the sight of the pine forest. From my bedroom, I could see the same spectacular view that I was now admiring again: the shimmering lake, the pontoon bridge, and the boathouses. Having spent two decades living in New York, I’d managed to convince myself that I preferred the electric-blue sky over Manhattan to the drone of the mistral and the cicadas, preferred the bustle of Brooklyn and Harlem to the scent of eucalyptus and lavender. But is that still true? I wondered as I rounded the Agora, an early 1990s glass building next to the library that housed a number of lecture halls and a movie theater.

I came to the “historic” red-brick Gothic buildings that evoked an American university. Architecturally, they were anachronistic and entirely out of keeping with the otherwise coherent style of the campus, but they had always been the pride of Saint-Ex, since they gave the school an Ivy League luster and made the parents feel like they were sending their brats to the local Harvard.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Thomas Degalais…looking for inspiration for your next novel, are you?”

2.

The voice startled me. When I spun around, I saw the smiling face of Stéphane Pianelli; with his long hair, his goatee, his round John Lennon glasses, and the bag slung across his chest, the journalist from Nice-Matin looked exactly as he had as a student. His sole concession to the present day was that the T-shirt beneath his sleeveless jacket was emblazoned with the φ logo of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s populist left-wing party, La France Insoumise.

“Hey, Stéphane,” I said, shaking his hand.