her childhood, she thought of her bedroom in Montparnasse. She thought of the pink and white wallpaper, embossed with gold curls that sprouted into tiny flowers, which she loved to pick in secret near the skirting board behind the chairs, digging her nail into the flowers and scratching out the cakey plaster underneath. A row of dolls dressed in coloured lace ran the length of the window seat, with heavy cold hands, white bisque faces, and real hair. Jeannette rarely touched them. Her favourite toy was a sticky tarot deck, which she spent whole afternoons arranging and rearranging on the floor, casting incantations. The girls from school were jealous of the miniature ivory elephants, the music boxes, the tin ship with the painted crew, and when they came round to play they wanted to wind them up and work their limbs, and at first Jeannette would sit patiently and allow them to do so. But sooner or later she demanded the other girl play with her instead, and together they would invent religions on the window seat, directing spells at the hats of passersby. Jeannette selected chants from a book of poetry, and her favourite was on page 92, from a poem called “Resignation”:
As a child, I dreamt of the Koh-i-Noor,
Persian and Papal richness, sumptuous,
Heliogabalus, Sardanapalus!
Héliogabale et Sardanapale! they called from the window, pointing their fingers at solitary men, watching how they reacted or did not react to the effect of the witchcraft, and the doom that lay ahead of them.
Papa was the patron of the toys. Jeannette had no brothers or sisters, and her mother Ariane was affectionate but withdrawn, and often kept to her bedroom. After lessons, or when she came home from school, Jeannette read the books her father gave her under the bed until her elbows were sore from the carpet bristles. When she thought about her childhood in later years, she thought of the view from the bedroom floor: the spaces beneath the chairs were shelters from equatorial typhoons, the woodwork below the window a carving from an ancient civilisation. On the bookcase she could remove the panel behind the encyclopaedia to access a round hole in the wall, which was a hiding place for scrolls and treasures. As she grew older she imagined different kinds of adventures and began reading novels, which she bought on her way home from class and concealed inside the dust jackets of history books.
One Friday afternoon, the year she turned sixteen, Jeannette returned from school to find their neighbour sitting with a policeman at the kitchen table. Her mother, they said, had shot herself with a pistol in the courtyard. Her father was not yet back from the university. The neighbour heard the shot and called the policeman, who had already called the undertaker. They looked at Jeannette with frightened eyes and offered biscuits and tea. She was surprised to find that she could not even open her mouth to form a yes or a no.
In the aftermath, all parental reserve evaporated and Frédéric told his daughter everything. Her mother had expressed the urge to end her life on at least two other occasions, but those episodes were so far apart that he had not considered them cause for serious alarm. “Forgive me,” he said, pulling a handful of his hair near the crown. Every now and then he would say, “Oh,” and cover his mouth, and she knew he was remembering something.
Jeannette seized at these details with appetite, at every memory that slipped out of her father’s mouth between his silences, while he sat in the living room staring at the floor, mouth contorted with regret. Death had loosened the truth from him and he was miraculously unguarded: gone was the man who cantered off midconversation; in his place stood a mass of uncatalogued private facts. Thus exposed he gave Jeannette everything. In the days leading up to the funeral he described his courtship, his impressions of the woman who became her mother at each stage of knowing her, how she changed and did not change over the years.
Without meaning to, with these stories he opened a whole hemisphere of his daughter’s imagination, so that once the coffin was finally laid in the earth and he began to close his wounds Jeannette was still picking at hers. A woman was taking shape in her mind. Not only was this woman her mother, she was also Mademoiselle Ariane Passant, and Madame Ariane Molineu, a figure made out of the