In 120 pages, Modiano describes the course of Jean’s derangement in spare, evocative language. The meaning in his successful, comfortable life evaporates, and in a quietly unspectacular way, he comes apart. ‘One day this sense of emptiness and remorse submerges you. Then like a tide, it ebbs and disappears. But in the end it returns in force, and she couldn’t shake it off. Nor could I.’ This is the kind of madness close enough to normality to go unnoticed, and the writer handles the subtle transition with delicate skill. But what is the source of Jean’s obsession?

This is the puzzle that Modiano’s narrative slowly unfolds. Partly through Jean’s hypothetical reconstructions, and partly through fragmentary glimpses of her life in Paris during the War, the reader is gently nudged towards a fuller understanding of what haunts Ingrid. The nightmare is Paris under German occupation, with its curfews, privateering, and methodical persecution. Ingrid eludes – or does she betray? – her fate, but she does not, finally, escape. Death, however, does not dispel the darkness. The corrupt spirit of the Occupation continues, for Modiano, to gnaw quietly away at contemporary French souls.