As a result, I did not know my father. Rather, I knew only what my mother said of him: “Hush, your father is sleeping” or “He’s working.” He was the figure at the end of the upstairs hall. A blond giant with bushy eyebrows, who made silly faces and smiled kindly when addressing his children. Although hardly a stranger to us, he was inaccessible, a sphinx enshrined in work that was never, ever to be disturbed. He was the Man of the House. And we were brought up in the cult of his well-being, thus burnishing the halo of prestige with which our mother had endowed him. Isolated by all this deference and devotion, however, my father was like a walk-on dignitary in an operetta: he never had a say in anything. My mother was merely giving him the illusion that he was the center of her life, for no matter how often she claimed that “between her husband and her children, she had chosen her husband,” I just could not believe in her self-styled role as a loving wife. Because in my eyes, she was as incapable of caring about her husband as she was about her children.
Given the adults in our lives, L’Agapanthe was a fixed point in an unreliable world. Our life there was comfortable and unchanging, in spite of the onerous rules and prohibitions Marie and I had to observe, which left us with a faint but constant melancholy ennui. We knew that this misery sprang from a noble motive, which our parents called education. Ours was Jansenist in inspiration, except that far from inculcating in us a characteristically aristocratic and religious contempt for money, our austere upbringing made us familiar with luxury while forbidding us to enjoy it. As a result, impressed by the sumptuous décor of the house, guests at L’Agapanthe imagined us living pampered lives they would never have conjured up for us had we been observed in a house in Brittany or on a farm in Limousin, and they never suspected that not only were we excluded from the privileges reserved for adults, we were also deprived of their pleasures, such as swimming, which we could enjoy only while they were napping, and with strict instructions to abandon the beach under some pretext as soon as any grown-ups showed up, so that we would not be a bother to them.
We learned, therefore, to be self-effacing. A lesson in tactfulness for which I am grateful to my parents, although it condemned my sister and me to watch others take bold advantage of the opportunities of life, whereas in our chosen professions, we sit on the sidelines, interpreting their language or unconscious minds. With that same reserve, we have both conformed to the images assigned to us since childhood, Marie as the pretty girl who picked a career in which her beauty works wonders, even though she could have gone into academia, astrophysics, or banking, and I as the smart girl who decided on a profession in which I can use my mind without being put on display.
Still, L’Agapanthe did bond us together, my sister and I, as soon as Nanny began going on her own vacations instead of accompanying us there. Marie and I “rubbed off on” each other. I pushed Marie to break free of the idea that she was simply some dumb blonde, and I succeeded so well that she quickly rose to the top of her profession and set up her own agency. She no longer works as an interpreter for anyone but the President of the Republic, whom she accompanies on all his travels. And Marie in turn has helped me to find my own beauty, even though my work has always been more important to me than my appearance. I was so used to being not much to look at that I had to make a real effort to stop feeling invisible. Thanks to Marie’s guidance and assistance, though, the glances I get from men these days tell me that I’m nicely visible indeed.
And L’Agapanthe has become part of our identity. By demonstrating the subtle framework of our codes and contradictions, this house, all by itself, could illustrate our education, how we became who we are, as well as the refinement and culture of our parents. We had come to realize, of course, that L’Agapanthe was being changed by time, even deformed, in a way, through repairs and renovations, and we knew that the life we led there,