Situated to the east on the site of the market gardens that had once been the pride of Antibes, La Fontonne was a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Seen on a map, it looked like an idyllic spot set next to the beaches of the Mediterranean, but the reality was less promising. Although there was indeed a shingle beach, the nearby houses were cut off from the sea by the highway and the railway lines. In the mid-1980s, I had attended the local school, the Lycée Jacques Prévert, of which I had terrible memories; academic standards were poor, the atmosphere was toxic, and violence was endemic. The more gifted students were miserable there. A handful of heroic teachers managed the school as best they could. Without them and without my friends Maxime and Fanny, I think I might easily have gone astray. When the three of us were accepted at Saint-Ex, it changed our lives dramatically. For the first time, we could go to school without feeling terrified all the time.

Since then, the reputation of the school had improved and the area had been completely transformed. Near Bréguières, one of the main gates to the hospital, the old hothouses had been demolished to make way for housing developments and blocks of luxury apartments. There was no tourism here; this was a residential area sprinkled with small neighborhood shops.

I pulled in to the hospital parking lot. Not for the first time today, I was returning to a place that immediately evoked memories.

Winter 1982. I am eight years old. I’m chasing my sister in the garden—she’s stolen my Big Jim to turn him into a slave for her Barbie doll. I accidentally knock over one of the metal benches on the patio and the sharp edge of the bench slices off a piece of my big toe. At the hospital, after giving me several stitches, a bungling junior doctor forgets to use a gauze pad and sticks the surgical tape directly onto my skin. The wound becomes infected, and for months, I’m not allowed to play any sports.

I still have the scar to this day.