So, asked the stern little text message from my elder daughter, how many poor bulls have been murdered? Leaving aside the perjorative second verb, the answer was five, with one to go.
And the thing with bullfighting is that you know exactly that they will indeed go. There is not meant to be any other outcome and the odds on a bull surviving an encounter with a toreador - and, of course, the array of other armed men confronting it - are probably similar to those a condemned man might rely on when hoping to be spared if the trapdoor fails to open.
With differing degrees of resistance, all six bulls at the 5pm corrida in the imposing Roman arènes of Nimes played their parts according to script. Not all went as swiftly and cleanly as is prescribed; cries of assassin could be heard during a couple of botched, delayed kills.
And when it was all over, I left the arena with the usual mixture of emotions: wonder and even elation at the gripping, colourful spectacle, accompanied by such powerfully evocative tradition, and sheer, unmitigated guilt at having colluded as a spectator with the perpetrators of such dark cruelty.
It is, as I have said before, a thoroughly uneven contest. The toreador does not engage the bull man to beast until the hapless thing has been weakened by the horse-mounted picadors and prancing banderilleros.
Of the three toreadors I had witnessed in action, Miguel Angel Perera had enjoyed the best of evenings, collecting two ears and the tail - a frankly excessive award according to the middle-aged Nimoise to my right - after his first kill and one ear for the second
Afterwards, he was carried shoulder high from the arena and mobbed by spectators as if he were a pop star.
Even without Hemingway's gift for describing such scenes, I could see he was, on the day, a cut above the others, with his elegant, crowd-pleasing gestures and manoeuvres. He strutted in the manner that toreaodors strut, took his kisses and grisly trophies from a costumed young woman and, in one rather nice touch, applauded and tried to plant an appreciative slap on the carcass of the first of the bulls he dispatched as it was dragged past him.
The other bullfighters had more laboured conquests, and one of them, the highly rated Cesar Jiminez, received a few catcalls for his trouble. One poor bull was so lethargic and lacking in menace that a man shouted: "Where did you get that one - the supermarket?" My neighbour was equally unimpressed. "They've filed down the horns," she said.
Lacklustre or potentially lethal, blunted horns or not, the six bulls ended up just as dead. Taureau, presumably by coincidence in what is after all a bullmeat-eating region of France, was on every other restaurant's menu as the streets filled with revellers enjoying the férias. And I was left feeling uneasy about what I had seen.
It is probably too much a case of having it both ways to oppose bullfighting while also watching it as often as I do. I can hardly put up a strong case for wanting it banned provided I can go on attending la corrida until it is. Yet if I am honest, that is as close to my position as it is possible to define.
Bullfighting, and the celebration of death as well as life and art, are embedded in the cultures of the Spanish and many in southern France. For all my reservations, I respect their traditions. Perhaps for my own sake, the ban needs to come sooner rather than later. 
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