25 MAY 1985, Page 30

Retreat

I met him in a restaurant near the Madeleine and while we waited for his wife to come his fingers galloped on his chair.

Twice during lunch he took out his pen to draw up maps on the paper cloth.

He'd been that morning to the Faubourg St. Honord to a shop selling uniforms and tin toy soldiers, then afterwards to see Napoleon's tomb.

He'd looked in the military sections of bookshops, and bought a book about the Occupation of Paris.

At two o'clock he put on his coat, fastened the little leather grenades and barked goodbye. His boots resounded like gunshot on the cobbles. And tacking along behind, with packages in her arms, went his wife, a potential deserter.

Felicity Napier