It occurs to me only now that I might have spent far too much time in France. Indeed, so familiar with Paris did I claim to be that, in 2023, I was contacted by an agency in need of someone who could conduct specialised ‘art tours’ for small groups of foreigners. Most of these clients were Americans, largely from the Midwest, but there was also a number of well-to-do Chinese and the odd Indian. They wanted much the same thing: they’d seen the Eiffel Tower and been ripped off on the Left Bank; they’d eaten at Lipp and some had even bussed out to grottier banlieues to get a real-life taste of La Haine. What they really wanted, however, was someone to hold their hand around the museums.

They paid well and bought spurious ‘VIP’ packages to the Louvre and Versailles, priced over the odds by several degrees of plausibility. At the former, they ignored Géricault’s ‘Le Radeau de la Méduse’ and Delacroix’s great history paintings, instead demanding to see the ‘Mona Lisa’ and settling for a distant, blurry selfie taken from the fringe of the room. At the last, they’d start early on the champagne, and the wives, three sheets to the wind, would strike poses and get me to take their picture by the Petit Trianon. Then it would end: they’d get bored and we’d go for lunch. I liked all of these people – and not only for the stupendous tips they left me. None of them seemed staggeringly wealthy, but the kind of money they were dropping on museum entrance fees beggared belief. I don’t know how much the institutional con of a surcharge set them back, but the Louvre in those days charged €22 for entry to its permanent collection – a collection to which, for all my insistence, nobody paid much attention.

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