We remained at the end of the queue, hypnotized by the anonymous power of the crowd. I was afraid to look up, or even to move. My hands, thrust into my pockets, were trembling. And when I suddenly heard my sister's voice, a few words tinged with a smiling melancholy, it was as if they came from another planet. "Do you remember? 'Roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles'?"

She laughed softly.

And as for me, as I looked at her pale face with the winter sky reflected in her eyes, I felt my lungs fill with an entirely new air – that of Cherbourg – with the smell of salt mist, of wet pebbles on the beach, and the echoing cries of seagulls over the endless ocean. For a moment I was struck blind. The queue was moving forward, slowly pushing me on toward the door. I allowed this to happen without letting go of the moment of illumination expanding within me.

Bartavels and ortolans… I smiled and gave my sister a discreet wink. It was not that we felt superior to the people squeezed together in the queue. We were like them, we may well have lived more modestly than many of them. We all belonged to the same class: that of people squelching about in trampled snow in the middle of a great industrial city outside the doors of a shop, hoping to fill their bags with two kilos of oranges.

And yet when I heard the magic words, learned from the banquet in Cherbourg, I felt different from them. Not because of my erudition (at the time I had no idea what these famous bartavels and ortolans looked like). It was simply that the moment held within me – with its misty lights and its marine smells – had put all that surrounded us into perspective: the city and its very Stalinist squareness, the anxious waiting, and the obtuse violence of the crowd.