My Ph.D. was a mistake for which I only have myself to blame, but at least it got me back to Paris. I spent the middle of the three years of the State studentship in a fourth floor flat from the windows of which one could see the side wall of Saint-Sulpice. Opposite the façade of this church, and across Saint-Sulpice square, was the town hall of the sixth arrondissment where I was married. The official who performed the ceremony was a portly man with a wide tri-colour sash diagonally displayed across his ample chest and lower regions. His splendid appearance increased the sympathy I already felt for the secular, anti-clerical tradition in France (écrasez l'infâme). My future wife's parents claimed that her already ailing grandfather would die unless she and I complemented the civil formalities with a benediction in a church and we agreed to this very much on the same principles once espoused by Henry of Navarre. I was glad that this religious service did not take place in Saint-Sulpice, convenient although that would have been, since it has always struck me as one of the ugliest churches in Paris.

It would be hard to think of a more privileged place for students to live than the Saint-Sulpice area. We inherited the flat from a Cambridge researcher and his wife, and the rent was very low because the whole building was undergoing extensive renovation. At one point during the year water dripped from above onto our bed and at another, much more extended one, the landlord's builders demolished our bathroom and toilet. The inconvenience of this second episode was considerable, but the flat was only a few minutes’ walk uphill to the Luxembourg Gardens and only a few hundred yards downhill to the Odéon metro and the centre of the Latin Quarter. From there, you could move left into Saint-Germain-des-Près and past those cafés, Les Deux Magots or Le Flore, where it was rumoured Sartre and his friends still occasionally hung out; or right into the Boulevard Saint-Michel and student life at its most visible and lively. Every morning I would go neither right nor left but straight on down towards the river and cross the Seine by the Pont des Arts.