Cossery would rise late each day, leaving the hotel only in the afternoons, perhaps to take in the sun and watch the girls of the Luxembourg gardens. He would sit for hours at the Flore doing nothing. He wrote only when he had absolutely nothing better to do, producing a new novel roughly every decade. To waiters who asked him if he was not bored, he replied: “I am never bored when I’m with Albert Cossery.”