‘But he’s not handsome,’ she continued thinking. ‘He looks like the llama at the zoo in the Botanical Gardens: gentle and slightly offended.’

In an effort to stifle a scornful laugh, two dimples appeared on her rather pale cheeks; all the children of Paris had pale faces. She was a slim, graceful girl with a soft, serious face, grey eyes and hair as fine as mist. ‘What kind of husband would I like?’ she wondered. Her thoughts grew sweet and vague, full of handsome young men who looked like the Hussar from Napoleon’s Army on the print opposite her. A handsome, golden Hussar, a soldier covered in gunpowder and blood, dragging his sword behind him through the dead leaves … She leapt up to help her grandmother clear the table. She felt a jolt that brought her back from her dreams to reality; it was a unique and rather painful feeling: someone seemed to be forcing her to open her eyes while shining a very bright light in front of her.

‘Growing up is so tedious,’ she thought. ‘If only I could stay the way I am …’ She sighed rather hypocritically: it was flattering to inspire admiration in a young man, even if it was only the well-mannered Martial. Bernard Jacquelain had gone out on to the balcony and she joined him among the cages of canaries and turtledoves. The steel bridge vibrated: the metro had just passed by. A few moments later, Adolphe Brun came out to the children.

‘The Humbert ladies are here,’ he said.

They were friends of the Brun family, a widow and her daughter Renée, who was fifteen.

Madame Humbert had lost her brilliant, charming husband early on. It was a sad story, but a good lesson for the youngsters, or so they said. Poor Monsieur Humbert (a talented lawyer), had died at the age of twenty-nine for having too great a fondness for both work and pleasure, which do not go together, as Adolphe Brun remarked. ‘He was a Don Juan,’ he would say, shaking his head, but with an expression of admiration, mixed with condemnation and a tiny bit of envy. Twirling his moustache and looking pensive, he would continue: ‘He had become very conscious of his appearance. He had thirty-six ties’ (thirty-six stood for an exaggerated number). ‘He had started to indulge in luxuries: a bath every week. He caught the chill that killed him coming out of one of the public baths.’

His widow, left with no money, had been forced to open a milliner’s shop to earn a living. In the Avenue des Gobelins stood a boutique painted in sky blue; high up on the roof was a plaque bearing the inscription: ‘FASHIONS by GERMAINE’ finished with a gold flourish. Madame Humbert launched her creations on her own head and her daughter’s. She was a beautiful brunette; she carried herself with majestic dignity, showing off one of the first new straw hats to come out this spring, trimmed with a burst of artificial poppies. Her daughter wore a modest creation of tulle and ribbons: a stiff bonnet but as light as a lampshade.

They had been waiting for these ladies before going out to finish their Sunday in the fresh air. And so they all headed for the metro at the Gare de Lyon. The children walked in front, Bernard between the two girls. Bernard was painfully aware of his short trousers and looked with anxiety and shame at the golden hair that shone on his sturdy legs, but he consoled himself by thinking: ‘This is the last year …’ Besides, his mother, who spoiled him, had bought him a cane with a gold knob and he played with this nonchalantly. Unfortunately, Adolphe noticed it and muttered: ‘He looks like a dandy with that cane in his hand …,’ which spoiled all his pleasure. Lively, always on the go, slim with beautiful eyes, to his mother he was the personification of masculine beauty, and with a jealous pang in her heart, she thought: ‘He’ll have so many conquests by the time he’s twenty,’ for she intended to keep him at home until then.

The young women wore black cotton stockings with nice tailored suits that modestly covered their knees. Madame Humbert had made a hat for Thérèse just like Renée’s, an impressive creation decorated with chiffon and little bows. ‘You look like sisters,’ but what she really thought was: ‘My daughter, my Renée, is prettier. She’s a little doll, a kitten with her blond hair and green eyes.