Her fingers were burning hot. I felt as if she was branding me. For life.

Happiness. One day. Ten thousand years ago.

Of course, every new caress would only have taken us closer to the inevitable: break-ups, tears, disillusionment, sadness, anguish, loathing. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to the mess that human beings make of this world.

Why was it so difficult to make new friends once you were past forty Was it because we didn’t have dreams anymore, only regrets?

Killing was easy. Dying was something else.

We were all moving to a pre-ordained end. You just had to open the papers and read the international news, or the crime reports. We didn’t need nuclear weapons. We were killing each other with prehistoric savagery. We were just dinosaurs, and the worst thing of all was that we knew it.

We’re slaves, not idiots. That’s all you have to understand.

Marseilles isn’t a city for tourists. There’s nothing to see. Its beauty can’t be photographed. It can only be shared. It’s a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you’re in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight.

The one thing I could give them was a smile. I’ve always been good at smiles.

Our taste for books came from Antonin, an old second-hand bookseller, an anarchist, whose shop was on Cours Julien. We’d cut classes to go see him. He’d tell us stories of adventures and pirates. The Caribbean. The Red Sea. The South Seas... Sometimes he’d stop, grab a book, and read us a passage. As if to prove that what he was telling us was true. Then he’d give it to us as a present.