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of Gertrude Stein. The artist Édouard Vuillard (of the complicated pattern paintings) would often be around with his elderly friend and fellow painter Ker-Xavier Roussel, who would rather reluctantly join us all for a swim in the sea in a laughably tight rubber bathing cap. And the writer Colette would slump in, I don’t know from where, with her perpetual query to me: ‘Tu as vu mes chats, petite anglaise?’ (‘Have you seen my cats, little English girl?’)
    Sometimes they all sat around the large table in the garden looking down at the beach and the sea across to St Raphael, the sunlight playing on the big white tablecloth. The conversation (as much as I could catch of it) was animated, violent and voluble. I was terribly impressed by them. As I wrote to my father, ‘They are serious and cultured people … Their friends are gay enough but they make a clique of Paris life which can only be joined after real hard work and success.’
    One day Père Manguin’s model failed to turn up. His wife, Madame Jeanne, was not available to sit for him. She had some business to attend to in town.
    ‘Et pourquoi pas, Patoun?’ she suggested to her husband.
    He looked at me, snorted in disgust and muttered some comments about Englishwomen. Picking up a bowl of fruit from the table he went off to his studio to do a still-life painting.
    A few days later, however, I was sitting on the beach with the children when the old man’s voice came from behind ordering me not to move. After being frozen for what seemed like hours, I was at last allowed to get up.
    ‘There,’ he said, handing me the picture to look at. ‘That is an English back.’
    He stomped away without another word. I wasn’t sure if he meant this as a compliment but I was pleased to have made the grade as a model.
    It was early in my second visit to his house in August 1939 that I finally broke the ice with this daunting figure and his family. I remember the moment precisely. We were seated at the dinner table on the large verandah overlooking the bay. The darkness had come down and the evening air was gentle and cool. The last train had rattled beneath us, taking the workmen home from the torpedo factory near by. As the conversation continued around me I had my perpetual concern: what could I say to amuse or even interest them?
    ‘Tell us about your family,’ said Madame Jeanne, turning to me with a smile. ‘Étonne-nous, Patoun.’
    I gulped in desperation.
    To me there was nothing exciting to say about my family that would surprise her, as she wanted. As I saw it, we were a rather staid, middle-class lot. There was an elder brother who had been at Cambridge and who was now an ambitious cleric; an elder sister in a secretarial job; my mother at home; my father, a reserve naval commander who worked in the City …
    ‘Ton père,’ said Monsieur Claude. ‘Que pense-t-il de Monsieur Churchill?’
    ‘Beaucoup,’ I said lamely. There was bemused silence at the table. ‘Mon père porte un monocle de temps en temps,’ I volunteered in despair.
    In truth, it was only on very rare occasions that I had seen my father using a monocle. Nevertheless, I mimicked him putting it to his eye and looked around the table rather fiercely. Everyone laughed, much to my surprise. Biquet began to copy me. ‘Je suis Monsieur Say,’ he said as he went around the table, peering at the members of his family rather pompously through his imaginary monocle.
    I suddenly realized that with this small and innocuous gesture I had at last opened the door to the Manguins’ affection and interest. From now on I was to be accepted as part of the family. I was drôle , a character. Farewell the gauche English girl who always seemed at a loss for words. No longer would Père Manguin threaten me with his gun when he was ‘fishing’ with bullets from the window of his studio. And now conversations at the dining table would often end with ‘N’est-ce pas, petite anglaise?’ To be happy was