Did she want an answer? She’d fixed her eyes on me, drawing mine up to meet them. “I’m afraid it hasn’t changed,” I said.

“No. Of course not. Have you borne children?”

“No,” I said

“You’ve been lucky.”

“Yes.”

The Chief Waiter had reached her table again, and he said to her sternly, “Is this person pestering you, Madame?”

“Pester? You are the one pesters me.” She flapped the clean ‘soiled’ napkin at him. “Be off! Where’s my fruit? I wished for fruit. The Patron shall hear how casually I’m treated here.” The Chief Waiter bowed and left us. Obviously he was accustomed to her ways. “I sent you to my grandson, didn’t I?” she asked me. When I nodded, she said, “I hope you’ll forgive that. I suppose he never gave you any sort of remuneration. No? That’s like him. They say he keeps a mistress in the rue Rassolin, but how can one credit that? Even so, he lavishes a lot of money somehow, and none here. This wretched place,” she waved her little wooden hand at the whole room, “it’s falling apart. Nothing spent on it for years. Do you know, today one of the bathrooms exploded? What a thing. The taps blew off under the pressure of the water. Then the water soaked into the passage and through into the rooms below. Thousands of francs will be needed. I tell you, little girl,” she said, conspiratorial, “one more good winter snow, and the whole crumbling edifice will collapse in rubble on the street.”

I had the instant image of the hotel performing this very act. Clouds of dust and snow-spray rose into a black sky speckled with watching stars; bricks and pieces of iron bowled along the road.

And suddenly, as if she saw this image too, she gave some of her sharp little barks of laughter.

“Don’t think,” she said, “I’d be sorry. Not even if a ceiling dropped on my head. Oh, I hate it here,” she said. And as suddenly as the laughter, her eyes were luminous and nearly youthful with tears. I had the urge to take her wooden hand. I didn’t risk it. “I was young once,” she confided. “Do you believe me?”