The cat dived for cover the minute Camille entered the room.
She's getting on in years, Kytie. She has well-established routines for most hours of day and night, dislikes big bags for fear of being in put in one and carted off on a trip, and runs for a well-protected corner if spontaneous youngsters drop in.
The Kid's a long-standing exception, but Kytie's wary even around her. Marianne's unpredictable sometimes and like Camille she has a clear, natural voice when she sings, a fiery will and a powerful physical presence.
While she was here at the weekend, we talked more music than usual, I gave her some new stuff I knew she would like, and after she left, I got on with overdue software updates, still reluctant to sit down and write any more.
But I did.
It's been months since I promised the Kid to introduce Camille, but now's the time because of software I sit on whenever a new version comes out from Apple, the mysterious Mac security update. It's fast enough to install, but once you have the computer automatically kicks into a routine known as "optimising system performance".
You don't want to do a new security update should you have any plans to use your Mac for anything else soon. It takes forever, hogging so much processor power on most machines almost nothing else works.
That's when you've got lots of time to listen to Camille again, so I did.
What happened to Camille Dalmais -- who adores wordplay herself -- between 2002 and last year I don't know, but it most certainly optimised her system performance. The spontaneous young Parisian sold 130,000 copies of 'Le Fil' within the first half of 2005.
 She's also just won a prize she never expected, being considered "the artistic revelation of the year" in the Victoires de la Musique (Fr).
She deserved it, but what gets her a column is just a foretaste of a quality that turns Camille red with embarrassment when she's told she got that too. The woman is a great healer.
This isn't just my word. I've heard it from many people, indirectly or straight, over the time it's taken me to begin to want to approach last year's release in words. To describe it as an album of voice and musical drones is to risk yawns all round, but I'm going to do Camille real justice ... just not tonight.
It's too soon.
Camille's weekend gift to me was a big one.
She lifted what was left of a writer's block and took her place in the company of women, including others who remain temporarily vanished since what's proved to be a fortuitous accident, and set me well on the road to further exploration of music and sexuality.
It's a difficult topic to tackle, but rewarding and with such a healing potential it should be done and the best way to do it will be to tell stories. I found that difficult on first spilling a few beans with no idea what people would make of them. Not any more.
Camille marked herself out in 2002 when she emptied her bulging handbag: that's what upset the cat. It's not that she's badly behaved or distressingly noisy -- if you discount a moment when the crockery flies.
It's that presence of hers.
She reminds me of the Kid. She reminds me of other smart, funny and outgoing young Parisians with eyes and ears that miss almost nothing. She reminds me of arriving here in 1980 and realising what I had taken for French would need plenty of forgetting and learning anew if I was to make sense of anyone.
This unfortunately means she's not for everyone.
There's so much inside 'Le Sac des Filles', her first album, that what fell out when she turned it upside down and went on to do the same with the contents, you know she must have been stuffing her handbag for years and watching what her friends shoved into their own. She sings about those on the title track.
Like many a newcomer on the scene, she opted for autobiography. Camille, an art student, took a political science degree pretty much for the sake of sticking it under her belt, little else. She said in some interview (I forget where) she was cut out to be a singer and musician from the age of eight. So she's got a studious side, but you can bet she debunks French intellectuals, notorious for claptrap, like everyone else who pays them scant attention.
She's a rebellious and sensitive woman with time for the shaky old man on a park bench, the 30s and 40s music her parents like, the ageing movies for which Paris is still a cinema paradise, and a characteristically Parisian approach to those steps in Montmartre that get tourists so excited in summer. In winter, they're wet, slippery, steep and a pain.
That's all in the handbag, her 'Paris', along with cabaret music and the first hints of a new spin on la chanson française to which she does lasting damage for the greater good of all, on Le Fil.'
Autobiographical though the earlier mish-mash might be, it makes a change when the focus isn't Camille. It's what she's seen and heard and what her friends get up to, the kind of kids you see every day. When it comes to sex, she can be joyously unsympathetic. I won't translate the lyrics. The result would fall as flat as the former boyfriends she tells a moping girl to lay off in 'Ex', but I hope you get the drift:
"Les ex c'est comme les expresso
Ca se boit vite ça se boit chaud
C'est pas comme l'amour impossible
Les ex c'est toujours accessible
Ca laisse penser d'un coup de latex
Un coup de fil et un duplex
Et plus besoin d'un mode d'emploi
On a déjà fait ça X fois."
Many French country people flinch at the sight of a incoming Parisian licence plate, knowing that what will spill out of the car is likely to be impatient, arrogant, nosy, snobbish and bad-mannered. "Paris is not France," they like to remind you.
This is true. I love it when they empty the place in summer. However, they have their qualities and that kind of exasperated wit, delivered as fast as the traffic on the Place de la Concorde, is just one of them. Even Kytie came out of hiding in the end once she realised Camille is a very nice girl.
That's where she started, cheerful, kind, insightful and uninhibited. I'm not sure I want -- and certainly don't need -- to know what really brought her into her own, because that's her business.
I've not done with Camille since she and some others aren't through with me. Last year, she told 'Les Inrocks'*:
"For me, music is inevitably learned, since it's something precise. But at the same time, if any music is going to move me, it has to grab me physically."
Mmm. That's, maybe, half the story...
__________
*Credit for the scanned photo: Philippe Garcia
10:13:33 PM link 
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