After one such hot and fruitless search, back in the flat, Mehtab kicked off her sandals and began examining her bunions, groaning each time she touched upon a tender spot. “My God,” she said, “this is worse than finding a flat in Mumbai.” She was just about to summon me over to examine her feet, but I was spared by the phone ringing, which I jumped to pick up.

“Am I speaking with Chef Haji?”

It was an elderly-sounding man at the end of phone, and I could hear, somewhere in the background, a dog barking.

“Yes. This is Hassan Haji.”

“Chef, I met you many years ago, when you were a young man just starting out. In Lumière. My name is Le Comte de Nancy Selière.”

“Oui, Monsieur Le Comte. I remember you well. You came every year to Le Saule Pleureur.”

“I hear you are looking for space. To open a restaurant.”

“Yes, I am. Quite right. How did you know?”

“Aah, Chef. You should know this by now. Paris, it’s a village. Gossip spreads with utmost efficiency through the markets, particularly when it involves haute cuisine. Or politics.”

I laughed.

“Yes. I suppose you are right.”

“Are you free? Perhaps you’d like to come visit me. Number Seven Rue Valette. I might have just the thing you are looking for.”

*   *   *

Le Comte de Nancy Selière owned a maison particulière, complete with turrets, up at the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève hill. He was just a half block from Le Panthéon, the basilica and elegant square where France’s great men, from Voltaire to Malraux, are buried in its chilly crypt. Mehtab and I, we were awed by the count’s imposing home, and we stood meekly out on the street, nervously ringing the bell, fully expecting to be met by a severe butler ordering us to the servants’ entrance in the back. But it was, much to our surprise, the count himself who opened the door, tousle-haired, in corduroys and leather slippers.

“Come. It’s two doors down,” he said, after curtly shaking our hands.

Without waiting for our response, Le Comte de Nancy headed down the raked Rue Valette, still in his house slippers, a large set of keys on a ring jangling from his liver-spotted hand.

I will always remember the first moment I set eyes on Rue Valette’s ivy-clad No. 11. The sun was setting over the city’s rooftops as I looked down the hill, and a glorious haze of pollution had created a kind of pink halo around the limestone building, reminding me of the lighting in Lumière.

No. 11 was half the size of the count’s imposing home, and it appeared rather plump and jolly, the wooden shutters and the ivy encircling the bottom floor giving it a relaxed air of informality. More country, in short, and less the hard elegance so common in Paris.

The entrance hall was quite dark, covered as it was in heavy wood paneling, but through the second set of doors we discovered a series of linked and airy living rooms and anterooms, each in itself not large, but flowing gently from one to the other. I stood in the main salon for several moments, under the crystal chandelier, imagining the possibilities, and it was not at all hard to picture an elegant dining room. Folds of heavy velvet sealed off the tall windows looking out onto the street, and we pulled the drapes back. Even in those weak shafts of dusty sunset, we could see how fine the wood pleating was in the parquet floors.

There was, in the back, a very large room and bathroom, ideal for a kitchen conversion, and it led out to a small courtyard for deliveries. The light-filled floor above we could rent as offices, because there was an internal spiral staircase installed in the 1970s connecting the two floors. The three higher floors in the building had their own side entrance, but the count said he did not rent them out; that was where he stored old furniture and paintings inherited from his family. So a restaurant in the bottom two floors would not be a noise problem for other tenants. Mehtab and I, we tramped between the two floors, up and down the spiral stairs, not believing our eyes and trying not to give too much away.

My heart fluttered.

For the first time in a very long time, I felt like I was home.

“What do you think?”

“Fantastic,” Mehtab whispered. “But can we afford it?”

Just at that moment, from downstairs we heard the count impatiently jangle his keys. “Come, now, you two,” he yelled. “I can’t stand here all day waiting for you to make up your mind. I have work to do. You must leave now.”

Back on Rue Valette, I looked at the neighborhood with fresh interest, as Le Comte de Nancy locked the building’s door again. Down the hill, Place Maubert, the Saturday farmers’ market, and the subway station. Up the hill, the elegant Panthéon. It would take me at most ten minutes to walk to work from my flat over by the Institut Musulman.

And directly across the street, just down from the Collège Sainte-Barbe of the Sorbonne, stood one of the finest addresses of the Left Bank: the elegant Monte Carlo, a brass-plated apartment building where the mistress of the late president of France, a fiery Socialist, was known to be kept in magnificent ancien régime style in a third-floor flat. Two potted palm trees and a uniformed doorman now stood sentinel before the Monte Carlo’s carved doors.

No question. It was a fantastic location.

“Well, young man? Are you interested?”

“Bien sû-sûr,” I stammered. “It’s lovely. But I don’t know if I can afford it.”

“Pff,” said the count, waving his hand. “Mere details of finance. We’ll work something out. The point is, I want a good tenant, reliable, and a restaurant of quality, well, it rather suits my particular tastes and interests. And you, I believe, you need a good address to make your mark. So we have a common purpose. Terribly important for a partnership. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes. I do.”

“So there we have it.”

He held out his arthritic hand.

“Thank you, Monsieur Le Comte! Thank you! I will not let you regret your decision. I promise.”

I shook his hand, rather vigorously, and for the first time the aristocrat smiled, with little yellow teeth. “I am sure of it,” he said. “You are a young chef of talent and that is why I am backing you. Remember that in the days ahead. Now do not worry. I will have my lawyer contact you very shortly with the details.”

Le Comte de Nancy Selière became not just my landlord but also my best customer. Le Chien Méchantwas his “local,” as he often said. But even that description does not really do his role justice in what later became of me, for the count was in fact a kind of protective spirit, always looking out for my interests.

The rent we settled on was fifty percent below market rates for the first two years, but even over the subsequent years the count only increased the rent very gradually, and usually prompted by some increased insurance cost of his or to keep up with a wave of inflation. Fact is, throughout the next years the count helped me in a hundred different ways, including, right from the beginning, a line of credit on very good terms from his own bank, for the four hundred thousand euros I still needed to borrow in order to complete my two-million-euro vision.

But more than that, I liked the fellow. Le Comte de Nancy was a surly curmudgeon, that is true, but he was also very decent, to anyone who gave him a chance, and really quite amusing. When, for example, one of my junior staff had the temerity to ask the count if he had room for dessert, he looked at the fellow as if he were a dolt before replying, “My dear man, a gourmand is a gentleman with the talent and fortitude to continue eating even when he is not hungry.”

But on that first day, the moment the count expelled his breath with that particular “Pff” after I had asked about the property’s costs, I knew in my gut what had just happened. For that noise, so arrogant and dismissive, it was very familiar to me, and while I had no proof, indeed never got it, I knew in that instant the arrival of Le Comte de Nancy Selière and his property, it was all somehow the work of Madame Mallory’s invisible hand.