There is something quite noticeably regal in her disposition – a self-possession and poise that is perhaps part inherited. De Maigret was born into a family of Polish and French nobility. As the granddaughter of Polish Prince Michel Poniatowski and daughter of Count Bertrand, she is technically a blue-blooded Countess – a feature of her history that has to a large degree informed the course of her life and a fact that appears to remain unreconciled within herself, even as an adult with a family of her own. “It’s a bit strange, the day you wake up and realise that (the world in which she was raised) is not how the world is made and everything you’ve been told is not reality, and maybe … you’ve even been lied to,” she says, recoiling ever so slightly as if the memory itself were encroaching on her physical space.

It was this remote existence from the ‘real’ world and subsequent awareness of that suspended reality that motivated de Maigret to abandon Paris and her degree in literature at the Sorbonne, to head to New York where no one knew her name to beat her own track, make her own coin, and fashion for herself a world independent of her roots with which she could identify. “I could finally live my own life and be who I wanted to be – no family, no background. I think that’s what happens to a lot of people in New York. You can start over there. There’s this freshness about it.”

“For me a good image is a combination of things – the mood, character, angles and lines. It’s very hard to put words to it. You either get goosebumps or you don’t.”