No first course, nothing to whet the appetite: food was a serious business. In the Brun household, they always started with the main course; they were not averse to roasts – when properly cooked according to simple, strict rules, these were akin to classics of the culinary art – but here, the woman of the house put all her effort and loving care into the skilled creation of dishes simmered slowly for a long time. In the Brun household, it was the elderly Madame Pain, the mother-in-law, who did the cooking.

The Bruns were Parisians of some small private means. Since the death of his wife, Adolphe Brun presided over the table and served the meal. He was still a handsome man; bald and with a large forehead, he had a small upturned nose, full cheeks and a long, red moustache that he twisted and turned in his fingers until its slender tips nearly poked his eyes. Sitting opposite him was his mother-in-law: round, petite, with a rosy complexion crowned with fine, flyaway white hair that looked like sea foam; when she smiled, you could see she still had all her teeth. With a wave of her chubby little hand, she would brush aside everyone’s compliments: ‘Exquisite … You’ve never made anything better, dear Mother-in-law … This is just delicious, Madame Pain!’ She would put on a falsely modest little face and, just as a prima donna pretends to offer her partner the flowers presented to her on stage, she would murmur:

‘Yes, the butcher did me proud today. It’s a very nice cut of veal.’

To his right sat Adolphe Brun’s guests – the three Jacquelains – and to his left, his nephew Martial and Brun’s young daughter, Thérèse. Since Thérèse had just turned fifteen a few days ago, she had put her curls up in a chignon, but her silky hair was not yet used to the style she tried to hold in place with hairpins, so it was escaping all over the place, which made Thérèse unhappy, in spite of the compliment her shy cousin Martial had whispered to her:

‘It’s very pretty, Thérèse,’ he said, blushing quite a bit. ‘Your hair I mean … it’s like a cloud of gold.’

‘The little angel has my hair,’ said Madame Pain. She was born in Nice, and even though she left at the age of sixteen to marry a ribbon and veil merchant from Paris, she still had the accent of her native city, as sonorous and sweet as a song. She had very beautiful dark eyes and a lively expression. Her husband had left her destitute; she had lost a daughter who was only twenty – Thérèse’s mother – and was supported by her son-in-law; but nothing had affected her cheerful disposition. With dessert, she happily drank a little glass of sweet liqueur as she hummed a song:

Joyful tambourines, lead the dance …

The Bruns and their guests sat in a very small dining room flooded with sunlight. The furniture – a Henry II sideboard, cane chairs with fluted legs, a chaise longue upholstered in a dark fabric with flowers – bouquets of roses against a black background – an upright piano – everything huddled together as best it could in this small space. The walls were decorated with drawings bought in the large department stores near the Louvre: young girls playing with kittens, Neapolitan shepherds (with a view of Mount Vesuvius in the background) and a copy of The Abandoned Woman, a touching work depicting a woman who is obviously pregnant sitting on a marble bench in autumn, weeping as a Hussar of Napoleon’s Army disappears in the distance among the dead leaves.

The Bruns lived in the heart of a working-class area near the Gare de Lyon. They heard the long, wistful whistles of the trains, full of resonance, that passed them by. But at certain times of the day, they could feel the faint, rhythmic, metallic vibrations coming from the large iron bridge the metro passed over as it emerged from deep beneath the city, appearing for a moment under the sky before fleeing underground again with a muffled roar. The windows shook as it passed.

On the balcony, canaries sang in a cage and, in another, turtledoves cooed softly. The typical sounds of Sunday rose up through the open windows: the clinking of glasses and dishes from every floor, and the happy sound of children from the street below. The brilliant sunlight cast a rosy hue over the grey stonework of the houses. Even the windows of the apartment opposite, dark and grimy all winter long, had recently been washed and sparkled like shimmering water in the bright light. There was a little alcove where the man selling roasted chestnuts had been since October; but he was gone now, and a young girl with red hair selling violets had materialised to take his place. Even this dark little recess was filled with a golden mist: the sun lit up the dust particles, the kind you get in Paris in the spring, that joyful season, dust that seems to be made of face powder and pollen from flowers (until you realise that it smells of dung).

It was a beautiful Sunday. Martial Brun had brought in the dessert, a coffee cake with cream that made Bernard Jacquelain’s eyes light up with joy. They ate it in silence; nothing was heard but the clinking of teaspoons against the plates and the crunching of the little coffee beans hidden in the cream, full of heady liqueur. After this brief moment of silence, the conversation started up again, just as peaceful and devoid of passion as a kettle simmering gently on a stove. Martial Brun was a young man of twenty-seven with beautiful doe eyes, a long, pointy nose that was always a bit red at the tip, a long neck he kept tilted to one side in a funny way, as if he were trying to hear some secret; he was studying medicine and talked about the exams he was soon to take.

‘Men have to work so hard,’ said Blanche Jacquelain with a sigh, looking over at her son Bernard. She loved him so much that she felt everything applied to him; she couldn’t read about an epidemic of typhoid that had broken out in Paris without imagining him sick, even dying, and if she heard any military music, she immediately imagined him a soldier. She looked darkly, sadly, at Martial Brun, replacing in her imagination his nondescript features with those of her adored son, and thinking that one day Bernard would graduate from one of the great universities, showered with prizes.

With a certain sense of complacency, Martial described his studies and how he sometimes had to stay up all night.