Perhaps, after all, it was a good thing that this had happened now. She’d “gotten it out of her system,” whatever “it” was, and had emerged unscathed.

She was about to ask the driver to move on when a tall, slender woman came walking down the street, holding the hand of a girl of perhaps nine or ten years of age. The woman wore a long woolen coat with a high collar trimmed with opossum fur, and a matching cloche hat. There was something regal in her bearing. The little girl, in a coat that was almost a miniature version of the woman’s, was all but skipping just to keep up with her long stride. As Genevieve watched through the taxi window, the child looked up at her mother with an expression of utter adoration, and the mother smiled back down at her. The little girl had endearing kneesocks, and on her feet were a pair of black patent-leather Mary Janes.

Something stirred in Genevieve. A very particular sadness. A long-nursed memory.

“Driver?” Genevieve rapped on the screen. “Turn around, please.”

“You don’t want to go to Rue de Lota?” came the gruff voice from out front.

“No. Not yet.”

She got out at Place Vendôme and paid the driver. Through the eight-sided piazza she walked, gazing up at the infamous column. It had started out as a statue to the Sun King, Louis XIV, before being torn down and replaced with a column made from 1,250 Russian and Austrian cannons celebrating the exploits of Napoleon. It was then pulled down again and later rebuilt yet again as a replica of its last incarnation. She’d had a good view of the column from her suite at the Ritz, just across the way, beside the Ministry of Justice. Those were fun times at the Ritz. She’d had her first encounter with Lulu there, late one night in the bar. Lulu was barefoot, followed by a black panther on a leash. She carried a bowl and was calling to the waiter for some water for her “chat noir.” When the waiter became nervous, Genevieve stepped forward and filled the bowl from her champagne bottle, to the apparent approval of the “chat noir,” which lapped it up instantly, so that she felt obliged to provide a top-up, muttering, “Your panther has expensive tastes.”

“Absolutely,” said Lulu. “That’s why we get on so well. We could be sisters, she and I. We have the same blackest black hair, as you can see, the same angry eyes, and the same way of dealing with difficult men.”

The next time Lulu appeared in the Ritz bar, a few nights later, she came straight over to Genevieve’s table and greeted her warmly by name, as though they were already old friends. She had no memory of the panther.

“I must have borrowed it from someone,” she said vaguely.