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growing dim even for him, Monsieur Lafayette padded softly over to a lewder version of Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’, brought the little key out of his pocket and stuck it between the naked lady’s lissom white legs. The picture split in two, the cupboard doors swung open and a delightful aroma suddenly filled the air. A mixture of scents all jam-packed together of spices and sweets, candlesticks and tea biscuits, sugar loaves and licorice, pickled eggs and beetroot, boiled hams and cheeses, silver polish and peppermints. Monsieur Lafayette sniffed appreciatively, rummaging through his secret store cupboard over tins of Victoria sponges and earthenware pots and pots of Brittany butter until he unearthed what he knew to be a box of sardines. He brought it out, blew the dust off it then locked the cupboard up again, the picture magically re-composing itself. Then he got up and walked back into the front of the shop, slipped the key into the old wig box on the counter, smoothed his moustache in the fly-spotted mirror and knelt down beside the old stonecutter.
    â€˜I believe I have an invitation to dine chez Renan?’ he bellowed into the poor man’s ear.
    â€˜Quite,’ cried Mistigris, leaping up with surprising agility and throwing his arms out to the counter for support. ‘In our curules, sir. In our curules!’

Chapter four

    Eveline Renan stood in the middle of her kitchen, staring in dismay at the contents of the saucepan. There was barely enough to go round, even with the few potatoes she’d found on the stall in the Rue Marcadet. It had boiled away to nothing beneath her very eyes like spinach always did, however much you thought you had at the start.
    Well to hell with it, she suddenly decided, stirring vigorously with a wooden spoon, keeping it warm at any rate. She did her best and if anyone dared complain she’d throw the saucepan over their head! It was good to vent her feelings like that. She often did in the cramped little kitchen, waiting for her father and Jacques to return, bashing the saucepans, chipping the plates, yanking the door off the larder cupboard which was quite bare save for two carrots and a tin of pears she was keeping for Christmas. The longer she had to wait, it seemed, the more she fell to thinking about all the things that were wrong with her life. ‘Stuck away in crumbling stucco,’ she would moan a little dramatically over the chopping board. ‘Barely a woman but with the hands and back of a fifty-year-old hag!’ None of this was entirely true, of course, for the house (though made of yellowing stucco as all the houses were in that district) was hardly crumbling; her hands (though no stranger to laborious work) were soft and white as a lily and her back (though admittedly often bent over drudgery) remained straight and supple as a beech tree. But it did her good somehow to work herself up into a frenzy of misunderstood martyrdom. A frenzy which always ended in a list of grievances as long as her arm of things that needed to be done around the house such as the chimney that had to be re-pointed, the leak in the roof that had to be mended and, a particular bugbear of hers, the vine on the south wall that had to be cut back because the grapes had shrivelled to raisins and the wine they produced was sour as a lemon rind. Even her father couldn’t drink it! Occasionally she tortured herself by imagining what it would be like to be a shop girl on the Rue Ornano, skimming through a life of bows and silks, sales and crinolines; or la Païva the great courtesan who lived on the Champs Élysées behind a fountain of eau de cologne and a flower-gemmed terrace. Even the life of a lowly dancer seemed preferable to her own, though her father had warned her it was all bunions and besides. Eveline thought that when you were short of the necessaries, a few besides would come in mighty handy.
    She lit the lamp with trembling