Past a big display of fresh roses, we went into the marble-lined restaurant. Lunch at the Hotel Crillon is more an institution than an event. The restaurant has cultivated a style of sumptuous dining that has become almost a cult. Every aspect (the table, the ambience, the menu) is arranged with the same attention to detail as if Charles Swann himself was expected. The waiters were fast-moving, darting around us in a blur of efficiency and flapping tail-coats. Pate foie gras (even though I am not happy about how it is made - in yet another compromise I went along with everyone else), terrine, lamb with vichyssoise, caramelised fruit. To drink we had a bottle of Sancerre, which was wonderful (worth the trip to France in itself). We went round the table proposing toasts - I suggested “La Reine”, primarily to the present Queen of England, but also doubling for that long-gone Queen of France who had her head sliced from her body to satisfy a howling mob barely a hundred metres from where we sat. Did her spirit still hang in the ether, I wondered, nostalgic for her singing lessons? Did she join us, craving mortal company, sitting in the empty place left for Alan Nixon? As usual the effect of the alcohol was to make me feel melancholic, and I knew that if left unchecked the melancholy would turn to morbidity. This downward drift in my thoughts was arrested by Gary Spencer nudging my elbow and pointing across the restaurant to one of the windows.