I grabbed a glass from a passing tray, took a sip, and immediately tipped the rest into a flowerpot. Clearly the school’s idea of a welcome cocktail did not stretch beyond ginger iced tea made with foul-tasting coconut water. I wandered over to the buffet. Here, too, administrators had evidently opted for a sort of low-calorie feast. It felt like being back in America, specifically in California or in certain areas of Brooklyn where the cult of healthy living reigned supreme. There were no stuffed vegetables niçoise, no courgette-flower beignets, no Provençal pizzas. Nothing but miserable carrot and cucumber crudités, shot glasses filled with low-fat desserts, and cheese on certified gluten-free toast.

I walked away from the buffet tables and went to sit at the top of the huge polished-concrete steps that circled part of the square like the seats in an amphitheater. I put on my sunglasses and, hidden from prying eyes, observed my former schoolmates with interest.

They were making toasts, slapping each other on the back, showing off cute photos of their toddlers or their teenage children, swapping e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers, friending each other on social media. Pianelli had been right—I was an outsider in this world; there was no point pretending otherwise. I didn’t feel nostalgic about my school years and I was essentially a loner, always walking around with a book in my pocket, and with no Facebook presence, I was a square ill-suited to an era of Like buttons. And I had never worried about the passing of time. I hadn’t freaked out when I turned forty, when I started to go gray at the temples. To be honest, I was eager to be old, because it meant distancing myself from a past that, far from being a lost paradise, was the setting of a tragedy I had been running from ever since.

4.

My first observation about my classmates was that most of those who had bothered to show up were from the sort of wealthy backgrounds where people are determined not to put on weight. The main scourge of the men was baldness. Nicolas Dubois’s hair transplant wasn’t exactly convincing; Alexandre Musca was trying to hide his bald patch with a comb-over; Romain Roussel had opted to shave his head completely.