An expensive cigar smoked with one’s eyes closed – that’s all it takes to be rich.

Like someone who revisits a place where he lived in his youth, with a cheap cigarette I can return – heart and soul – to the time in my life when I used to smoke them. Through the mild flavour of the smoke, the whole of the past comes back to me.

At other times it’s a certain sweet. A mere piece of chocolate can shake up my nerves with the surfeit of memories it provokes. Childhood! And as my teeth sink into the dark, soft mass, I chew and savour my humble joys as the happy companion of my toy soldiers, as the knight in perfect accord with whatever stick happened to be serving as my horse. Tears well up in my eyes, and along with the flavour of the chocolate I can taste my bygone happiness, my long lost childhood, and I voluptuously bask in the sweetness of my sorrow.

This ritual of taste, however simple it may be, is as solemn as any other.

But it’s cigarette smoke that most subtly, spiritually, reconstructs my past. Since it just barely grazes my awareness of taste, it evokes the moments to which I’ve died in a more general way, by a kind of displacement; it makes them more remotely present, more like mist when they envelop me, more ethereal when I embody them. A menthol cigarette or a cheap cigar wraps certain of my moments in a sweet softness. With what subtle plausibility – taste combined with smell – I recreate the dead stage settings and reinvest them with the colours of a past, always so eighteenth century in its weary and mischievous aloofness, always so medieval in its irreparable lostness!