Honoré de Balzac was a coffee addict – drinking up to fifty cups per day to fuel his prolific writing. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Verlaine were partial to absinthe. Dostoevsky had a gambling habit and reportedly rushed the end of Crime and Punishment because he desperately needed his advance. William S. Burroughs, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Coleridge took drugs. Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever and F. Scott Fitzgerald were alcoholics.

Plenty of writers, then, have compulsions, vices on which they relied to cope with daily life and the demands of creative pursuits. Happily, the only addiction I have is in the Robert Palmer vein (do you remember the 1980s song ‘Addicted to Love’?), and as a romance author, I see nothing wrong with that! But if I had to pick a passion, something that calls to me and I find hard to resist, it would be art.

I grew up in a home full of books about art from different eras and different cultures. My parents were both avid readers and collectors of art, and they taught me that to understand the art of a country one needs to understand the culture of its people. We received every month Apollo, Connaissance des Arts and The Collector’s Guide, all magazines that had to do with the world of art, and I pored over these, fascinated by the many facets of art, from paintings to ceramics, sculpture to tapestries. My parents began taking me along on their trips to the flea market in Alexandria, and there I discovered a world rich with colours and scents and textures – and I learnt the art of haggling! My father also took me to art auctions, where I found the mystery, the intelligence in assessing an object’s value, and the tension in the air during the race to win all quite thrilling.

Today, one of my favourite pastimes is antiquing and rooting around flea markets, of which there are plenty near my home in the south of France. When I go with my husband, who is English, the locals often assume I don’t speak the language well, and are taken aback when they realise I can bargain fluently in their own language! When I was renovating my French home I looked for furniture, and was proud that I managed to talk the vendor of a beautiful eleventh-century Provençal cupboard down to two-thirds of the price. But usually I’m drawn to the glassware, and I suppose you could say that is my weakness. I love to collect glassware that catches my eye – I find it very hard to walk away from a piece that is calling to me. As the great writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, ‘Collectors are happy people.’

Art, for me, is both inspiration and comfort. When I am researching a book, I visit museums and galleries in the setting, and I look at the works of artists depicting the area. There is something inherently visual about the way my imagination works. So when I am struggling to find the right word or to picture a scene in my mind, I would take an afternoon immersed in art any day over a coffee, a glass of wine or a flutter on the horses. As French Impressionist Edgar Degas said, ‘Art is vice.’