I have been in search of Charlotte Rampling. I’m going to add ‘enraptured’ by (the very name ‘Rampling’ suggests a rumble in a haystack is guaranteed).

First in Georgy Girl. Where, as Dirk Bogarde would have it, she was “as skittish as a young foal”. Then Stardust Memories, where her extraordinary emerald eyes seem to retain their colour despite the fact that the film is shot in black and white. In The Damned she moves like someone with no clothes on under her clothes. In the otherwise dire Orca: The Killer Whale she is, as the Goons used to say, “the nearest thing I had ever seen to a human being without actually being human”.

Even in Max Mon Amour - where she has an affair with a chimpanzee for god’s sake! - she retains her glacial beauty and mystique. What Bogarde called ‘The Look’.

I was at an impressionable age when our paths first crossed. A pretentious youth who affected to read Dostoyevsky and, like him, thought that beauty could save the world. Whether it came in the form of art, literature, or music, it was always intangible, always just out of reach. As long as it existed we had a chance. Which is to say at the age of sixteen all roads led to Charlotte Rampling.

Writing now from my late middle aged desk, I realise that is not true. If all roads lead to Charlotte Rampling why does the A9 end in Thurso?

I’ll warrant too that the sheer accident of her beauty could be seen as a curse as well as a blessing. Who is to say that her face was not the slave to her dreams?

It is February 2018 and I’m sitting in Brasserie Balzar in the shadow of the Sorbonne in Paris. Professors and academics read heavily annotated textbooks whilst Grande Dames toy with Dover soles. Japanese tourists take photographs of the place settings in front of them. When the food they have ordered arrives they video it.

I’m reading an article about Ms Rampling in a French magazine Citizen K, when I realise with mounting horror that I have been inadvertently stalking her. She mentions her four favourite places in Paris and over the last few days I’ve been in all of them, culminating in this place.

I am toying with a wonderfully unctuous Saint Marcelin cheese and a Sancerre rouge when the restrained, black, Coco Chanel suit glides past on dark heelless pumps. It’s owner takes of their sunglasses and bends to kiss someone before sitting down with her back to me.

The room is extravagantly mirrored but I can’t see her reflection anywhere. She is effectively vampire. She has picked the only place in a crowded restaurant where you can’t see anything except the back of her head.

No matter. I know who this is, I can’t control my hands, all thought processes are shot. Diffidence and apprehension come to the fore. I don’t want to approach for she is famously unknowable (and famously inscrutable) but I have to verify. To prove or show something to be true, genuine, or valid. After all, memory is a form of hunger and I owe it to my younger self to quench it.

In the end it is… (of course it is)… it is simple.

I walk past her on my way to the toilet and on the stairs down I see an old poster for a Julio Medem film Chaotic Ana and I know she was in it. On my way back up the stairs, I ask the waitress in a loud Scottish brogue if I can have it. The waitress looks to Charlotte Rampling’s table and then to me now at the top of the stairs.

At that, Charlotte Rampling looks round - still serenely beautiful at 72 - looks at me, nods a yes, and smiles.