On a Winter's Afternoon with a Slight Temperature

January 1962 finds Miss Brookner viewing the work of Réquichot in the rue de Miromesnil. His main invention, she sees, is a sort of 3D collage box: animals, birds and flowers cut from glossy magazines. The spectator 'gazes back through the glass as into an aquarium':

This is basically the Victorian scrap-book or screen re-thought and equally absorbing on a winter's afternoon with a slight temperature.

Not perhaps the highest art, she concludes. But she foresees for the fellow a bright future in window-dressing:

All rather ridiculous but, to quote Henry James, 'the French spirit is able to throw a sort of grace even over a swindle of this general order'.