Egg mayonnaise

A few crisp lettuce leaves, a hard-boiled egg sliced in half, lengthways, and a good dollop of mayonnaise. That's all I had last evening, and it was enough. But there was a time in my life when egg mayonnaise was a feast. A feast, because it followed days when I had tried to keep the hunger pangs at bay by drinking sugared water.
The setting, mind you, was romantic enough: a poky room on the top floor of a period apartment block in Rue Scheffer, not far from Trocadero. I could see the Eiffel Tour from the toilet window, which added a zest to micturition. It was summer 1958 and I was a painter in Paris. Seriously. After an academic year in Brescia, Italy, teaching English in a School of Interpreters, I moved to Paris for the summer with just a man's name and details of his likely wherabouts in my pocket. I found the man and that's how I became a painter. C'est a dire, peintre en batiments. Nothing artistic about painting butcher's shopfronts and stuff like that, though. Just a housepainter, but it was a way of staying in Paris, which, at 22, was my idea of ADVENTURE.
But only just. We rarely got paid. And when we did, there would usually be an argument between the man who gave me the work, Giacomo Mangiarotti, and his gypsy partner, Georges Champavert., after which each would tell me to ask the other for the money owed to me.
Hence the hunger pangs and the sugared water. So that, when I did have a little money in my pocket, I just had enough to go to a nearby eatery for egg mayonnaise. So this evening, as every time I eat this simple dish, I relive a very odd period of my life.
Never mind, it improved my French no end, and I managed to read Zola's Nana on the Metro on my daily way to wherever the work was. I felt a certain affinity with poor Nana, I can tell you.