A Hat on the Promenade Adds Exactly 12 Centimetres and Nothing Else

At 10:40 on the Promenade, a woman in a tangerine coat walks past a row of cobalt chairs and gains twelve centimetres. I know it is twelve because a man is following her with a folding brass rule, checking.

The man is Léon Marchetti, milliner, of a workshop two streets up from the flower market. His hats make people twelve centimetres taller. Not eleven and not thirteen. Eleven, he told me, looks like a lie. Thirteen looks like a mistake. He said this with the calm of a person who has never been wrong in public.

The hat is a tapered cylinder of acid green felt. It weighs 190 grams. It costs 340 euros. It is stiffened with a substance Marchetti calls a family secret and I call glue.

Now the verdict. Twelve centimetres is the ambition of a stepladder. This hat looks up at the sky, takes one rung and sits down. It has no brim to shade a face. It has no feather to start an argument. It has no veil to hide a thing. It is a chimney with nothing to say about smoke.

Consider what a hat could be. A hat could be a ruin, a weather system, an apology to a bishop. Marchetti has chosen a measurement. He has made a hat that can be defended in a tailor's office and nowhere else.

In fairness, and I am rarely in fairness, the colour works. The sun was low and clean, the shadows still cold and blue under the palms, and that green against the turquoise sea was the loudest sentence on the Promenade. You could read it from the far end by the airport. It is the only argument the hat makes, and it wins it.

Then the woman stopped at the crossing to wait for a cyclist, and a gull landed on the hat. It stood there for a full minute, feet planted, looking out to sea like a harbourmaster. The gull gave the only honest review of the morning. It called the hat a post.

Marchetti lowered his rule and asked if I would like a thirteen. I said no. He wrote it down anyway.