I love my Papa, but he’s been asking for it since this morning. Maman shrugs as he runs back down the hill, with one eye on the tourists below to see if anyone is bending down to pick up a black object. Maman doesn’t wait for him. She steps under the stone arch and turns to me by the door to the citadel.

‘You wanted to go to Tao, Clo. So go!’

She walks on.

Tao it is, then.

At that moment, my puzzled reader, I should furnish you with two short lines of explanatory context: Tao is a restaurant-bar-night-club at the very top of Calvi’s citadel. It’s incredibly famous! Incredibly hip! Incredibly busy! So I’m ahead of you … For what stupid reason did I want to go and have a grenadine or a menthe à l’eau in Tao?

Answer A: because the richest and cutest of the young arseholes on holiday in Corsica gather there?

Answer B: because it was there that the greatest balladeer in the world, Jacques Higelin, wrote the most beautiful song in the world, ‘La Ballade de chez Tao’?

I’ll let you guess.

Onwards to Tao!

So, we’re sitting at a circular table on our red mock-leather seats when Papa comes back, breathless.

‘Have you got it?’ Maman asks.

She’s ordered a piña colada.

‘No, not a trace of it.’

At that moment, normally, Maman would identify the make of the camera, the month and the year when it was given to him, and its emotional value – Maman has a bar code where her brain should be.

Except that Nico speaks first.

‘Are you sure, Papa, that it isn’t in your rucksack?’

Then Papa searches through his rucksack, pushes our glasses aside and empties the haphazard contents on to the table: keys, pens, a book, a road map, cigarettes, a plastic bag, until right at the bottom he finds … the camera!

‘Was it in your bag all the time?’

Maman can’t get over it. No danger of her apologising either.

‘I must say, it’s such a mess in there.’

Papa takes the blow. Maman sorts through the objects scattered on the table, the keys and the rest, until she’s surprised by the presence of a plastic bag, wedged between some sun cream and a pair of sunglasses.

A Benoa bag.

She opens it, delicately unfolds the package and discovers, to her disbelief, a short dress with a V neck and a bare back; there are dozens of red roses printed on the black fabric. It’s the very same dress that she’d stopped to look at! Papa had even slipped a matching ruby-coloured bracelet and a necklace into the package.

‘Is this for me?’

Of course it’s for you, Maman! And Papa’s played an excellent trick on you, pretending to have forgotten his Kodak so he could run back and get it.