misery of his days at the university was soothed when Ariane met him at the door and showed him the walls almost finished in a sprigged paper, or a new lacquer on the skirting board. Over dinner she offered him simple but sound wisdom; she said better to take longer than to rush and regret, and Frédéric was delighted at least as much by her confidence in providing solace as by the actual solace provided, and said yes, you are right, thank you my darling. After a year, he had still not published. But after thirteen months, Ariane was showing the first signs of pregnancy.
The baby was born earlier than expected. Her limbs were meagre and she cried through the night. They hired a Swiss nurse named Ingrid to help, and when Jeannette turned four, Ingrid left and was replaced by a nursery governess named Eva. When Jeannette turned eight, Eva left and was replaced by Lorena. It was during the epoch of Lorena that Ariane’s health began to suffer most noticeably. She spent more and more time in bed with various ailments, cheerfully resigned to the slow progress of recovery. No sooner would she be physically well again than she would plummet into a state of despair and confine herself once more to the bedroom. This behaviour was inexplicable to Frédéric. Ariane expressed extreme feelings of guilt over minor mishaps, often as trivial as misspeaking, or picking up the wrong glass in company. When he returned from the university in the evening, she would report the anguish of her day, how she entered a room wanting to do one thing and did another, and it was not right, it was not right, and Frédéric, bewildered, tried to soothe her as she had once managed to soothe him. The pattern of his days had reversed. His fears of ignominy had been unfounded, and he had secured a good position in the department following his publication. It was when he came home that the terror began.
How much did the neighbours know? Too much. The walls of those Montparnasse apartments were thin, and sometimes Ariane even went onto the balcony to wail. Though she said her pain was compounded by the dread of what other people knew and thought about her, even that did not stop her. Fearing their censure Frédéric did not confide in the Passants, nor did he want to send Ariane to a psychiatric hospital. For nine years she had been healthy! If it was an endemic neurological condition, he was anthropologically certain that she would have exhibited symptoms before now. Instead he took her to see a psychiatrist associated with the university, and employed a doctor to visit the house.
The child Jeannette suffered. All things circled around her mother, whom she could not reach. Ariane was the void in the whirlpool. The family moved to the edge of the Fourteenth Arrondissement and the new, thick-walled house was filled again with nightly wailing, and whispers and fingers on lips, as Lorena the governess pulled Jeannette from her mother’s door, dangling toys. Sometimes, during a particularly bad flare, the governess would simply join Jeannette by the door and cover the child’s ears as she peered through the crack.
When her mother lapsed, Jeannette became frantic and tormented the governess with crying, and her resentment persisted throughout her school years. But when her mother died, and her father confessed the details of this foregoing account, Jeannette’s anger was overlaid with other emotions. Some of what she felt was guilt. Some of it was the same curiosity that made her governess put an ear to the door. For the next four years she examined and rearranged the fragments of the narrative, like her tarot deck spread over the carpet, until the moment had arrived when the hold of the past became unbearable, and for a while she could not think about it anymore.
In the spring of 1915 the fighting started again at Ypres. The Germans were using poison gas. Sudden clouds, yellow-green, whistled free from canisters along the front between Steenstraat and Langemarck. They rallied and advanced as a single luminous mist, just as the French troops were called to the firing line. Among the dead were the Molineus’ chauffeur Pisson, and Marian’s husband Paul Richer. Marian wore her wedding dress to the memorial service. The photograph from the newspaper announcement was framed by a garland, and where “Paul Richer” had curled beneath his chest now a line of roses nestled. The Tricolore