Because the end of Finals left me at a loose end and I found nothing better to do, I wandered back to France. There must have been in either London or Paris an office which dealt with the distribution of French assistantships since I remember going there in the summer and asking whether there were any of what at that late point would be ‘returns’ or cancellations. Given the circumstances, I ought to have found myself trying to teach English to small groups somewhere in the Morvan, or a run-down area of one of the industrial cities, but instead I was offered a post at the lycée Charlemagne in Paris, a result no doubt of a late withdrawal and my having arrived in the office just at the right time. This school competed for status with prestigious lycées such as Louis-le-Grand or Henri IV, but it was located in the 4th arrondissement, which at that time was in a dilapidated condition, more in tune than now with its being traditionally known as le Marais. It was full of fine old buildings, including those of the early seventeenth century in the place des Vosges, but in the 1960s most of these were suffering from what vintners would have called pourriture noble. Not long after I had stopped working there, it began to become fashionable again and was extensively as well as expensively renovated. A sign of its position today is that when the retiring head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was finally allowed to leave America and arrived back in Paris, the journalists tracked him back from the airport, not to Neuilly or the 16th, but a luxurious flat in the place des Vosges.

When I had lived in Paris eighteen months before, I had rented a room from a retired couple out in the northern suburbs. This time I applied for a place in the Collège Franco-Britannique, one of many halls of residence for foreign students in a complex of buildings in the 14th arrondissement known as the Cité internationale universitaire. Founded after the First World War as a further manifestation of the entente cordiale, the Collège Franco-Britannique was when I lived there in the charge of a university professor of English called Robert Ellrodt.