The Wooing 

 I’m sitting on the bench in my jardin sauvage reading the fait divers column of Le Journal, when I hear the sound of kissing. It is coming from the building across the road, the third floor. I thought it might be a turtledove. But no. A plump little woman in a flouncy dressing-gown  leaning over the balcony is moue-moue-ing me shamelessly. Three little kisses followed by a prolonged loud one. I am distracted from a report of a mother of three in Toulouse who committed suicide by climbing into her deep-freeze. My soupirent is of a certain age. As I am, I suppose, and I’m taken aback when without any encouragement she starts the kissing cycle again. Rather than butterflying a response I decide to make myself  scarce. And, getting up, I notice that the marmalade tom-cat, that everybody thinks is cute, but I know better, has settled under my seat. He is unmoved.