Smoking Kills E-Book

Antoine Laurain

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 307

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

How far would you go to enjoy a cigarette?When headhunter Fabrice Valantine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to undertake a course of hypnotherapy to rid himself of the habit. At first the treatment works, but his stress levels begin to rise when he is passed over for an important promotion and he finds himself lighting up again - but with none of his previous enjoyment. Then he discovers something terrible: he accidentally causes a mans death, and needing a cigarette to calm his nerves, he enjoys it more than any other previous smoke. What if he now needs to kill someone every time he wants to properly appreciate his next Benson and Hedges? An original and totally French black comedy from bestselling author Antoine Laurain.

Leseprobe

Antoine Laurain was born in Paris and is a journalist, antiques collector and award-winning author. His novels include The President’s Hat, The Red Notebook and French Rhapsody.

Louise Rogers Lalaurie is a translator from the French, based between Toulouse, the Paris region and the UK. She co-translated The President’s Hat and was shortlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award.

Praise for French Rhapsody:

‘Beautifully written, superbly plotted and with a brilliant twist at the end’

Daily Mail

‘The novel has Laurain’s signature charm, but with the added edge of greater engagement with contemporary France’

Sunday Times

‘Anyone who enjoyed Laurain’s previous novels The President’s Hat and The Red Notebook will doubtlessly enjoy this new romp’

Portland Book Review

‘Witty, nostalgic – I was completely charmed’

Woman and Home

‘This gem blends soft humour and sadness with the extraordinary’

Sainsbury’s Magazine

‘A tale of dashed dreams, lost love and rediscovered hope that is also an incisive state-of-the-nation snapshot’

The Lady

Praise for The Red Notebook:

‘This is in equal parts an offbeat romance, detective story and a clarion call for metropolitans to look after their neighbours … Reading The Red Notebook is a little like finding a gem among the bric-a-brac in a local brocante’

The Telegraph

‘Definitely a heartwarming tale’

San Diego Book Review

‘Resist this novel if you can; it’s the very quintessence of French romance’

The Times

‘Soaked in Parisian atmosphere, this lovely, clever, funny novel will have you rushing to the Eurostar post-haste … A gem’

Daily Mail

‘An endearing love story written in beautifully poetic prose. It is an enthralling mystery about chasing the unknown, the nostalgia for what could have been, and most importantly, the persistence of curiosity’

San Francisco Book Review

Praise for The President’s Hat:

Waterstones Spring Book Club 2013 • Kindle Top 5 • ABA Indies Introduce Choice • Shortlisted for the Typographical Translation Award 2013

‘A hymn to la vie Parisienne … enjoy it for its fabulistic narrative, and the way it teeters pleasantly on the edge of Gallic whimsy’

The Guardian

‘Flawless … a funny, clever, feel-good social satire with the page-turning quality of a great detective novel’

Rosie Goldsmith

‘A fable of romance and redemption’

The Telegraph

‘Part eccentric romance, part detective story … this book makes perfect holiday reading’

The Lady

‘Its gentle satirical humor reminded me of Jacques Tati’s classic films, and, no, you don’t have to know French politics to enjoy this novel’

Library Journal

Smoking Kills

Smoking Kills

ANTOINE LAURAIN

Translated from the Frenchby Louise Rogers Lalaurie

Pushkin Press

This book is supported by the Institut français du Royaume-Uni as part of the Burgess programme.

www.frenchbooknews.com

A Gallic Book

First published in France as Fume et tue

by Les Éditions Le Passage, 2008

Copyright © Les Éditions Le Passage, 2008

English translation copyright © Louise Rogers Lalaurie, 2018

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Gallic Books,

59 Ebury Street, London, SW1W 0NZ

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-805333-64-7

Typeset in Fournier MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4TD)

Tobacco is the plant that converts thoughts into dreams.

Victor Hugo

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Looking back over the somewhat dizzying landscape of my life, I would say that before the events that turned it upside down, I was an unremarkable man, bordering on the dull. I had a wife, a daughter, a profession in which I was respected, and my criminal record was a blank sheet. But then, I was the victim of an attempt to oust me at work, my wife left me, and I had four murders to my name. If I had to sum up my unusual trajectory in one sentence, I would say ‘it was all the fault of the cigarettes’.

It was in 2007 that the heinous law took effect. The law that drove smokers to congregate outside office buildings in courtyards where smoking was soon also banned. Janitors and office cleaners quickly made it known that the sudden increase in their workload, from all the extra cigarette butts, would rapidly become unmanageable without a consequent re-evaluation of the fruits of their labour. Businesses ignored their demands and smokers were thrown out onto the street.

‘These heinous laws will have everyone doing it in the street.’ I had suggested this startling phrase to my lawyer, with a subtle nod to Marthe Richard’s law of April 1946 that ordered – with not a trace of irony – the closing of the maisons closes: luxurious, legal brothels across France, where champagne and other delights had been liberally dispensed for decades. Proprietors and madams suffered the torments of nervous depression, previously known only to bourgeois ladies of leisure and their overworked husbands. As for the girls, they found themselves out on the street. Self-employed, until they fell into the clutches of merciless, often violent, pimps.

Our sweetest vices – stockings and suspenders, champagne, curls of cigar smoke, sexy girls, packets of twenty – have been thrown out onto the street with the rubbish, with the State in the role of sanitiser-in-chief. The dreams of our elected representatives are the nightmares of science fiction: a world where no one smokes and no one drinks, where the men are all thrusting executives with dazzling teeth and careers to match, and the women are all smiling, professionally fulfilled mothers of 2.5 children. Sanctimonious laws for the good of one and all are building, brick by brick, a sad, uniform world that reeks of bleach.

My lawyer had been unconvinced by my reasoning, and even less about using it himself. Obviously, he would cite my nicotine dependency, but without making too much of it. I wasn’t in trouble for having smoked in a public place – it was ‘a little more serious than that, Monsieur Valantine’.

There are various ways to embark on a criminal career. The first is to discover you have a calling. Serial killers are an excellent example: from an early age they feel different and experience strong animosity to the world around them, coupled with a highly questionable determination to shape it to their own ends. Psychopathic, schizophrenic, paranoiac: medical terminology abounds for those who choose to dispatch their neighbour, often with elaborately staged savagery. And yet, since they repeat the same type of crime over and over again, they are quickly identified and generally end up behind bars, where they keep their psychiatrists happy and, more recently, make novelists rich.

It’s very important to distinguish the murderer, who is an occasional killer, from the assassin, who is a professional. The murderer may be the unhappy cheated-on husband who, on discovering his misfortune, seizes his hunting rifle or his lobster knife; if his career ends there, he will just be called a murderer. But the assassin makes a career of murder. The number of murders and the resulting criminal record determine his right to the title. A murderer could also be a bank robber who finds himself cornered by the forces of law and order, uses his weapon and kills two or three police officers. He’s dangerous, but he’s motivated by money, not by bloodlust. That said, the desire to grab someone else’s cash regularly leads to violent misunderstandings with bank cashiers.

Where among these examples would I place myself? I’m a little of all of them. I progressed from an initial blunder to fully premeditated crimes.

At the beginning of his career, the smoker is generally intent on killing no one but himself. But forces beyond my control drove me to become a killer of others. And not through passive smoking. When it came to murder, I played an active role. A very active role.

The train of events that drove me first to disobey the eleventh commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Not Smoke’, followed by the sixth, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, was set in motion one winter, that grey-white season, the colour of ashes and smoke, in my fiftieth year.

I was a hardened smoker with a forty-a-day habit, and I had exercised the royal prerogative of smoking in my office for fifteen years and more. The first blow came with the introduction of the law that banned smoking on business premises, other than in areas specially designated for the purpose. Initially, at HBC Consulting – Europe’s biggest firm of headhunters – we chose to ignore the ruling. The department heads were untouchable: no one would dare ask Véronique Beauffancourt, Jean Gold or myself to extinguish what was, for us, an extension of our anatomy. We were smokers of power. Nothing could bring us down. But dare they did.

The French Revolution probably had its roots in some rustic inn, one afternoon, where a man with a bigger mouth than everyone else slammed his tankard of wine down on the table and hollered ‘Death to the King!’, to the applause of the small assembled company. The man’s name, the names of the men who cheered him on, and the inn where the scene took place are long forgotten.

Precisely the same thing happened in business premises across France, in the early years of the new millennium. At HBC Consulting, the rebellion was sparked in the canteen, where the feisty workers found their Saint-Just in the person of a highly attractive young blonde woman who was the talk of the company during the brief time she worked for us. This long-legged creature, who was about as friendly as the prison gates I would soon come to know, loathed cigarette smoke with a vengeance. Her beauty was matched only by her intolerance of our poison of choice. And yet my male colleagues, who had been in the habit of lunching in nearby cafés, had all made a hasty return to the canteen. Despite its sub-standard food and drab view over the rooftops of Paris, overheated in summer and freezing in winter, the HBC canteen had suddenly acquired the allure of a changing room backstage at a fashion show. None of the men paid the least attention to their food – indeed, many ate nothing at all – but all were mesmerised by the new arrival’s figure.

‘She’s temping here. She’s a model really,’ whispered the frightful Jean Verider – Senior Headhunter for the marketing sector – at lunch one day.

‘You’ve spoken to her?’ I said.

Looking down at his grated-carrot salad, he flushed a deep red.

‘No, Françoise in Human Resources told me.’

The girl’s beauty was plain to see; and her loathing of all of us, with our grey suits and grey hair, was plain to see, too. Her loathing of us and her distaste for the canteen job she was forced to take while waiting for cover-girl fame were, I’m sure, the Molotov cocktail that blasted our smoking privileges.

Our exterminating angel managed to convince the refectory harpies that they were entirely within their rights to insist on the smoking ban at their place of work. One day, as we were all arriving for lunch, Véronique Beauffancourt asked for an ashtray and was refused. The large woman dishing out the cooked vegetables and sliced meat pointed to a small sticker she had affixed to the wall with her fat pudgy-fingered hands, an act which had no doubt given her a pleasure not experienced since her wedding night. A cigarette inside a red circle, the latter scored through with an oblique line of the same colour. Véronique, who was going through a divorce, declared it was a scandal, and was immediately backed up by Jean Gold with his collector’s Dunhill pipe (Caviar Collection). It so happened that Gold had set his sights on Véronique. For him, the incident was very timely. The union it led to continues to this day, because they still write to me, always with the same slightly irritating greeting: ‘Poor dear Fabrice, …’

I remember asking, that lunchtime, if this was some sort of joke. And the fat lady replying that indeed it was not, it was the law, and high time it was respected, or prosecutions would ensue. We were left speechless at the woman’s nerve. Immediately, a committee was formed to work out how to fight back and a direct appeal was made to Hubert Beauchamps-Charellier himself. Stirred by the fury at the smokers’ table, even Jean Verider – who was extremely reserved as a rule – was moved to speak, asking where the blonde canteen girl had gone, for she was nowhere to be seen.

A small, thin, short-haired woman, whom we all suspected of being a Trotskyist, at first pretended not to know who we were talking about, the better to stoke the mounting exasperation at our table. Jean Verider could bear it no longer.

‘The blonde bombshell, who do you think?’ he burst out. ‘This place isn’t exactly overrun with them as far as I can see!’

The woman glared at him.

‘Oh, I suppose you mean Magalie.’

‘That’s the one,’ Verider agreed.

‘Magalie left yesterday at lunchtime. We organised a small farewell drinks for her.’

‘And we weren’t invited?’ said Verider in a choked voice.

‘Canteen staff don’t fraternise with the office workers,’ she retorted, and turned on her heel.

The girl had breezed in, sown the seeds of our destruction and then disappeared. In less than two weeks, she had won over the canteen harpies like a white missionary converting a tribe of savages. It was a magnificent performance that we headhunters would have done well to ponder. Some people have a strange power of domination over others: a magical gift, capable of opening a thousand doors, either to heaven or to hell. Beauty is often a factor. Not always, I admit: Hitler, who stirred multitudes by preaching the superiority of the Aryan race, was short, dark and ugly. But that’s a different story.

‘It’s the law.’

Hubert Beauchamps-Charellier, the sixty-two-year-old founder of the business that bore his initials, had pronounced this while drawing on his Montecristo No. 1.

‘Nothing I can do,’ he went on; ‘that’s just how it is. Soon, it will be the norm. Look at me, puffing on my Havana cigar; I’m an outlaw. But I’m also the boss. I’m all alone in my office, and I can do as I please.’

‘We all have offices of our own, too!’ We had answered in unison, we three smokers, like children kept indoors at playtime by the teacher.

Hubert Beauchamps-Charellier gave a muddled account of laws, smoking bans and contraventions, which could end up costing him dearly and causing problems he neither wanted nor needed. Then he said he had an urgent call to make to a secretary of state. It was early afternoon. We returned to our respective offices and, ignoring the incident, continued to smoke. Benson & Hedges for me; Capstan tobacco in a Dunhill pipe for Gold; Vogue menthols for Véronique.

That evening, I told my wife what had happened. She also said that I’d have to get used to it, it was the law. As a non-smoker, far from sharing my dismay, she was actually a supporter of the putsch plotted by her kind. After a Martini Rosso each and (in my case) two cigarettes smoked in the sitting room, we headed out to the Paris Modern Art Museum for a private view: an exhibition entitled Inflammatory Art: Smoke and Flux.

‘Is this an anti-smoking show?’ I asked her.

‘No, Fabrice,’ she sighed. ‘It’s conceptual art. About the Fluxus group. I’ve explained it all before.’

My wife is editor-in-chief of Moderna, the iconic contemporary art review. An expert on three or four artists whose names I can never remember and the official archivist of a fourth, who has his own museum in America. I say ‘my wife’, because we are still married. I have stubbornly refused all her petitions for divorce since my incarceration, and continue to think of myself as the husband of the famous Sidonie Gravier.

Having no opinions whatsoever in common with the person whose life you share is a risky business. Even, I would say with hindsight, impossible. I have always, I admit, been impervious to contemporary art. After many years together, I would pay a heavy price for our aesthetic differences. One contemporary artist would suffer the consequences, too, and achieve greater fame dead than alive. He didn’t even have to ask.

I must say something about my wife because, in spite of all that came between us, I loved her deeply. More than that, I admired her. We met at a private view at the Centre Pompidou. The event was organised for the upper echelons of a select handful of finance companies. Cocktails were served. One guest, headhunted by HBC Consulting, had invited us along. Jean Gold, always at the forefront of modernity, and also a connoisseur of art, had just joined the firm and persuaded me and a few others to go with him. The name of the show escapes me now, but it filled an entire floor of the museum. Gold wandered among the exhibits, scrutinising each with interest while I tried to locate the buffet. In the throng I had lost the client who’d invited us and I went from one artwork to the next, wondering if they really deserved to be called art. Waiters in white jackets circulated amongst the chattering crowd with silver trays of champagne. I managed to grab two or three glasses and drained them. There was no one to clink glasses with – I had lost Gold now, too. I remember many guests going into raptures over a piece of rolled-up brown felt on a plinth. Years later, I discovered that this ‘tapestry without tacks’ was by an artist called Joseph Beuys, and extremely valuable. My troubles that evening started with those tacks. Beside me, an elderly woman peered at the piece of felt with an air of intense concentration.

‘What do you make of this?’ she asked.

I thought I detected a note of irony and replied that, personally, I wouldn’t give a handful of brass tacks for it. She glared and recoiled as if suddenly discovering I was dangerously radio-active. Never in my life had I provoked such derision. I drained my glass of champagne and tried to ignore her rudeness. Was I truly so uncultivated that I could not understand this sort of art? I felt like telling the old crone that my mother was an antiques dealer and my father an architect! Doubtless, she would have replied that with a pedigree like mine I ought to be ashamed. I moved along, wending my way between the studiously incomprehensible sculptures. Sheet metal, bronze, plastic, glass, everything looked as if it had been salvaged from a refuse tip and thrown together at the last minute. I envied these artists, churning out hoaxes with such aplomb, and living comfortably on the proceeds. The exhibition included a dustbin; I remember it clearly: an actual dustbin, full of actual rubbish.

‘That’s life,’ said a man next to me, gravely.

I turned to look at him. He nodded at me.

‘Yes. Unsurpassed, never bettered …’ he added.

If his argument was that rubbish bins were unsurpassable, I wasn’t about to contradict him. I would gladly have sold our office bins for their weight in gold to these enthusiasts. On top of a column there was a computer circuit, to which the artist had fixed some washed-out peacock feathers probably dipped in bleach. The whole thing looked like nothing so much as a crumpled mess and gave off a rather unpleasant smell. I peered at the label: Oedipus 64. I was none the wiser. Further along, a series of cork panels had been tacked together in a strange, twisting form that rose like a column. Rachel in August. Had the artist dared show the portrait to his girlfriend? I gave up trying to make sense of it all and set off in search of a place to smoke. It was high time.

I crossed another room, emptier than the others and opening onto a terrace that overlooked the piazza below, with its huge white funnels. On the terrace, I took out my cigarettes and lit up at last. No, modern art was not for me, of that I was certain. Beside me, just outside the door to the terrace, some thoughtful soul had placed a free-standing ashtray, already piled with grey ash. I wasn’t alone in taking a break out here. My thoughts wandered as my cigarette burned down. What would I say to Sophie, who cut my hair and who had been my lover for the past six months? Sophie had told me about the salon she dreamed of opening, the colleagues who would join her if she quit. It was a fine scheme, but thinking about it, I couldn’t picture myself in Sophie’s life. Not forever. Our liaison was just that – a liaison whose charm would dissolve the minute it became serious. I turned the situation over in my mind, tapping my cigarette into the free-standing ashtray at regular intervals. I could see no way out of this romantic entanglement, which was anything but romantic if the truth be told. My cigarette had burned down and I stubbed it out in the ashtray before pressing the knob in the middle with the flat of my hand. I liked these vintage designs: the top spun like a roulette wheel, sending everything down into the container below. A piercing shriek rang out. I turned quickly. Had a woman been stabbed? Or groped? Not at all. A blonde girl was staring at me, more horrified still than the old lady beside the roll of felt. Almost imperceptibly, her bottom lip trembled.

‘Wha— What have you done?’ she demanded, slowly.

She then repeated, shrieking so that everyone heard: ‘What have you done?!’

I stared at her in complete incomprehension.

‘I’ve just put my cigarette out,’ I said, as dozens of pairs of eyes turned towards me.

‘But, but …’ she stammered, approaching the now empty free-standing ashtray. ‘That’s a Frekovitch. You must be crazy!’

She ran out of the room. I stared after her, then looked down at the ashtray. Frekovitch? Not a make I’d ever heard of. Unless … I took a step back. I hadn’t noticed the two red ropes on gilt posts that protected the ashtray. I had thought the large mirror behind it was there for decoration. But, looking at it now, the arrangement seemed somehow deliberate. A work of art? A handful of people stared at me, frozen in horror. Others carried on with their conversations and paid me no attention at all. The young girl returned, accompanied by a dark-haired woman in a pale-grey suit. She had a sleek bob, blue eyes. And she was attractive. Very attractive. She walked right up to me and looked me in the eye.

‘Sidonie Gravier. I’m the co-curator of this exhibition,’ she said coldly.

Not wanting to seem rude, I shook her by the hand. Which disconcerted her somewhat.

‘Fabrice Valantine, HBC Consulting.’

‘He stubbed his cigarette out on the Frekovitch!’ yelped her colleague.

‘Did you really?’ asked the brunette.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’m so sorry, I mistook it for an ashtray. Well, it is an ashtray,’ I ventured, in my defence.

The two stared at me in silence, as if I had just told them the Earth was flat, I could prove it, and the rest of humanity had been very much mistaken, from Galileo onwards.

‘I’m really very sorry, I didn’t see it was a work of art; I’ll remove it right now,’ I said, turning towards the ashtray, ready to open it and retrieve my cigarette butt.

‘Don’t touch a thing!’ commanded Sidonie Gravier, furiously. ‘This ashtray, as you put it, contains the ashes of the artist’s sister. Its title is Sister in Cosmos 2. Look, that’s what it says, right there!’ She pointed to a label on the base.

Then she heaved a sigh, muttering that now they would have to sort through the ash.

‘Help me!’ she ordered. ‘And you’ – she addressed the blonde girl – ‘take care of Jack Lang; make sure he doesn’t head this way.’ I watched her assistant disappear, enjoying myself thoroughly now.

Sidonie knelt down and spread the lavish programme for the evening on her lap, into which I tipped the contents of the ashtray. Under the gaze of the small crowd that had formed around us, we fished out the cigarette butt and tried to separate the pale ash ash from the darker remains of the artist’s late sister. Finally, we repositioned the ashtray behind its red cordon and Sidonie arranged the contents as best she could, in a small mound, around the ebony push button. When the operation was complete, she sighed again and looked at me. Her vexation showed in the two charming dimples that had appeared on either side of her mouth.

‘May I offer you a drink?’ I asked.

‘The drinks are all on the house, Monsieur Valentin.’

‘Valantine. Fabrice Valantine. I’ll get you one anyway,’ I added, hailing a passing waiter carrying a loaded tray.

I took two glasses of champagne, handed one authoritatively to Sidonie and clinked.

She stared at me and a faint twinkle came into her blue eyes.

‘And what do you do?’

‘I smoke cigarettes in museums,’ I said.

She smiled thinly and took a sip of champagne.

‘What about you?’ I asked.

‘Well, as you can see, I run a funeral parlour for the sisters of contemporary artists.’

It was my turn to smile. The next day, I left Sophie and began my life with Sidonie. Some might say, smoke got in my eyes.

At the private view for Inflammatory Art – eighteen years after the incident at the Centre Pompidou, and for the hundredth or perhaps the two-hundredth time – I found myself wandering among utterly impenetrable artworks, with nothing to say about any of them. It was here that I first came across Damon Bricker, a young French artist, though his distinctly English pseudonym would have been better suited to the leader of a rock band. A newcomer on the contemporary art scene, he had made a name for himself thanks to his vile mania for setting fire to our furred and feathered friends: as the disciple of a mad British artist who specialised in formaldehyde and preserved entire cows sliced into pieces, this blond-haired poster boy cheerfully chargrilled his animal subjects, using his blowtorch like other artists use their brushes. His installation of a life-size charred and blackened chicken house, complete with hens, cockerels and a fox, had caused a sensation at the previous year’s FIAC art fair in Paris.

For Inflammatory Art, Bricker was showing ten glass domes containing a series of urban pigeons, all similarly charred and blackened.

‘Why do you do that?’ I asked him.

He gave me a strange look: clearly, the question had never crossed his mind.

‘Why?’ he murmured, looking me up and down. ‘That is the question …’

To me, the sight of the carbonised pigeons, like a row of post-apocalyptic scarecrows, was deeply unpleasant.

‘Don’t you like pigeons?’ I persisted.

He stared at me with the quizzical interest often reserved for the naive questions children ask.

‘No, nothing against pigeons,’ he declared. ‘But then Damien Hirst didn’t have anything against cows, either.’

He was referring to the complete cow carcass sliced through with a chainsaw and immersed in a series of aquariums at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. My wife had dragged me along to the art foundation’s opening there, and the walls of the Hotel Danieli are doubtless still ringing with the scenes of marital discord sparked by the comment I had left in the exhibition’s visitors’ book. ‘Perfectly sickening.’ With my signature, clearly legible underneath. Apparently, the anecdote had reached the ears of the Grand Carboniser himself, since he reminded me of it now.

‘“Perfectly sickening!”’ He spoke the words with a seductive smile. ‘So you’re the great contemporary art lover?’

‘Ever have any trouble with the animal welfare people?’ I retorted, anxious to avoid dwelling on the Venice incident.

‘Not that I know of. Unless you’re about to report me to the Paris Pigeon Fanciers’ Association, Monsieur Valantine.’

‘Well, there’s an idea …’

We eyed one another in suspicious silence.

‘Ah, you’ve met!’ cried Sidonie, coming up behind me. ‘Your pigeons are extraordinary,’ she told Bricker. ‘Aren’t they, Fabrice?’

‘Extraordinary. A great artist,’ I said, then turned and walked away.

My wife stayed chatting to Bricker while I wandered off through the museum. Alone in a room on the ground floor, I found myself drawn to the bookshop, closed at this hour. My eye fell on a book in the window with a photograph of a leading tobacco brand from the eighteenth century on the cover. I couldn’t help thinking that wars and revolutions aside, past centuries were infinitely more civilised than our own in which we burned pigeons and sliced cows in half to be exhibited in museums. My phone rang in my pocket. My wife was looking for me, as we were joining friends for dinner.

There were five of us, and happily the Grand Carboniser was not with us. As we walked along the street, my wife attempted to set me straight. I shouldn’t pass judgement on artists’ works to their faces, she said. It wasn’t done. I replied that every artist was open to criticism, by definition. They had a duty to play by the rules, it seemed to me.

‘They’re highly sensitive creatures,’ Sidonie insisted. ‘With very thin skins.’

That didn’t give them the right to blowtorch animals for pleasure, I replied, before letting it drop, as I had done so many times before. There’s a point beyond which every discussion becomes tiresome, and I often reflected on the rules of my own profession: interviews of up to one hour and no more. Enough time to know whether the candidate is right for the job or not.

I tried to interest the group in a brasserie with a fine entrecôte béarnaise and a decent Brouilly, but to no avail: everyone was thinking of their figures and wanted something healthier. We wound up in one of those sterile Japanese restaurants that serve fillets of raw fish which look like French patisserie, all bright colours and asymmetric shapes, accompanied by delicate balls of rice. Nothing at all like a decent plate of food, to my mind, more like some kind of fish-flavoured dessert. As one of my British counterparts was fond of telling me, ‘You’re so French, Valantine!’ Yes. He’s right, I am profoundly French, with all the faults that implies. ‘A Frenchman who likes an English cigarette!’ the genial Londoner would laugh as I produced my packet of Benson & Hedges, though strange to say, he filled his pipe with that most French of tobaccos, Caporal Export.

Although I failed on the entrecôte béarnaise, I had managed to ensure we sat in the smoking area of the sushi bar. Our party included Michel Vaucourt, the Avenue Matignon gallerist, and his wife. We smoked the same brand of cigarettes. After our raw salmon balls in soy sauce and several glasses of sake, it was time for coffee. The conversation had dwelt mostly on the upcoming FIAC, at which the bird-blaster would be guest of honour, with a top-secret new work. Even my wife had failed to get so much as a scrap of information out of him for her publication. After a while, people were polite enough to ask what I had been up to at work lately. I told them how we had recruited one of the best financial directors in the business for a rival company. I had been in charge of the whole delicate operation, which had enabled me to make some important new contacts in the major media groups, and ultimately to repeat the coup for one of the big names in advertising.

‘It’s an art in itself,’ Michel Vaucourt was kind enough to say. He understood well enough that I had never fitted in within their artistic circle, a situation that weighed heavily on me.

By way of thanks for his amiable remark, which had been met with silent acquiescence by everyone else around the table, I proffered my packet of cigarettes, having first popped one out for him to take.

‘We smoke the same brand, don’t worry,’ I said.

‘I don’t smoke anything any more,’ smiled Michel Vaucourt, raising his hand in refusal.

I stared at him in disbelief. His wife took his arm with a simpering look.

‘Michel hasn’t smoked for two months now. And he has a secret!’

‘A secret? I’m sure Fabrice would like to know what it is, wouldn’t you, Fabrice? You’re having some trouble with that at the moment …’ said my wife, in a meaningful tone.

I wanted to reply that no, I had no problem at all with ‘that’, and even less desire to know Michel’s secret, which he could kindly keep to himself, vile traitor that he was.

‘This morning they announced a ban on smoking in Fabrice’s canteen,’ Sidonie continued.

‘They’re rather late in implementing that,’ said Michel Vaucourt.

I couldn’t believe it. Now that it was full steam ahead with the smoking ban, the rats were leaving the sinking ship. Vaucourt had joined the enemy. He was as bad as the barman – another smoker – at the Hôtel d’Aubusson, who, ever since his hotel had implemented the ban, had been vaunting the merits of his smoke-free workplace. ‘I work better and I can breathe,’ he told me, earnestly. This was a man who from time to time used to share a smoke with me at the bar. And he wasn’t the first smoker I had seen rally to the opinion of the majority. Strange how people are apt to turn their coats once large-scale manoeuvres are under way. And especially in times of trouble. When France was liberated, Nazi collaborators were the first to rush to the Champs-Élysées and cheer General de Gaulle, whose broadcasts they had routinely ignored. Now the war on smoking was prompting the same calculated, cowardly behaviour, though it had to be said – and this was most surprising of all – it was, for the most part, genuine.

‘Go on, Michel, what’s your secret?’ Catherine Dix, the fifth member of our party, wanted to know, even as she was lighting a Marlboro Red. ‘I’ve been longing to give up for ages,’ she confessed, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke.

Michel Vaucourt looked serious, then assumed the air of a man who knows his audience will laugh, but doesn’t care. After a few seconds, during which everyone gave the appearance of waiting with bated breath for his pronouncement, he announced: ‘Hypnosis.’

At that, I let out a kind of high-pitched chuckle, that took even me by surprise. My wife shot me a furious look.

‘What’s got into you, Fabrice? You should listen, not mock.’

Michel Vaucourt raised one hand in the manner of a Native American chief at a pipe ceremony who only wanted to make peace with the Palefaces.

‘Fabrice has every right to be sceptical; I’d be the same in his position,’ he said, with the assurance of those who have conquered something others are still wrestling with.

‘I didn’t believe it either,’ he said, before explaining what it was that had made him see a hypnotist. It was a visit from a client, who had smoked three packets of Gitanes a day for over thirty years, then suddenly given up.

The renegade devotee of the soft blue packs had given him the address of a hypnotist that he’d been given by someone else. They were like an underground cult, passing the name of their guru around.

Vaucourt stopped speaking and drank a glass of water while the table sat in silence.

‘You’ll never keep it up, Michel,’ I goaded him.

‘What makes you say that?’ asked my wife, instantly.

‘It’s only been two months since Michel gave up. Believe me, it takes longer than that to be sure you can stick at it.’

‘How would you know? You’ve never stopped for more than a week,’ countered Sidonie, ‘and I was the one who went out and bought you an entire carton of cigarettes, you were so unbearable! Yes, it was me!’

She looked round the table. ‘You have no idea what Fabrice is like without his nicotine fix,’ she added.