In any case, the future lies not in the tourist centre, but in residential neighbourhoods, De Caix said: “What we learned from the lockdown is that people aren’t leaving their areas any more. We realised that the shop, which used to be a destination, no longer serves that purpose. It’s our turn to move to where the customer is.”

Gibert Jeune and its sister company Gibert Joseph have also been slow to react to the threat of Amazon; while the French secondhand book market is booming (book prices are much higher than in the UK, making secondhand books 63% cheaper than new ones on average), trade has mostly been captured by online platforms.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder