Sisters. Brigitte Lozerec'h

painting, which you’ve always found boring? You’ve always said so, even at the Louvre, not too long ago.”

      “With you it would be different,” she replied.

      “What a good idea, Mathilde!” my mother decided.

      M. Versoix put in his opinion: “A very good idea!”

      And Grandmother went them all one better: “The little one could come to my house once a week.”

9

      This exchange completely knocked the wind out of me, right there in the street. For years I’d been hearing: “The eldest has to have the grace to give in, Mathilde—don’t make her cry . . .”

      I was perfectly aware of a fact that eluded them: my little sister had simply glimpsed a door opening upon a world she didn’t know. Sensing that I wished to go through it, that I was standing on the threshold, she’d been stricken with panic. I could see it in her worried expression: she wanted to come with me, or else, barring that, to stand in my way. When M. Thorins let it be known that I might take classes with him, I’d seen it in her eyes: “Me too!” It’s possible that it occurred to her that, if I was a painter, I’d no longer be available the way I’d always been whenever I was allowed to leave the convent, from the time she took her first steps until our mother’s marriage.

      Before she could even walk I used to turn up in her world every time I could get out. I had a wonderful time playing with her, I cuddled and kissed her, and then I’d vanish for another month. Soon enough she’d toddle after me, chasing me down the hallway that was canted at an angle running along the façade of the building. She knew I’d hide myself in the cupboard at the end, that I’d shut myself into it and make noises like jungle animals and she’d punctuate her delighted terror with bursts of laughter. “More, more!” she’d demand, her eyes wide with excitement. My brief visits became a celebration for us both. Thanks to Eugénie, I had happy memories with which to fill that apartment, where I had nothing save an extra bed set up in what had been our late Grandfather Nolès’s study. Eugénie lived in the large room in the alcove—the room she’d shared for several months with the English nursemaid who’d gone back to London as soon as the child was toilet-trained. It was the room they’d given me after our mother got married.

      But I’d discovered reading; I began to draw; I enjoyed working on embroidery—the only thing I did with Grandmother. I still played with my little sister but now I also kept some time for myself. And I was constantly trying to find some way to make my mother less listless, trying to reach her in the tenebrous lands of sorrow or imagination she’d inhabited since the death of my father. Anything just to get her back again! She’d smile like an invalid, staring off into the distance as she stroked my cheek. In order not to annoy Grandmother, we no longer said the words “Swann House” or “Twickenham,” and certainly never spoke of our father, Frank Lewly. Making even the slightest mention of any corner of England made me feel I’d committed a sin as bad as keeping one’s hands warm under the covers.

      Whenever I wasn’t devoting my time to her, the little one watched my every move. What an extraordinary thing it is to see darkness imperceptibly overtake a pair of eyes! Beneath the fine golden lianas hiding her face, my sister’s eyes could give the impression of turning black. And yet, they were still green and always would be. A remarkable, subtle phenomenon would intervene: the pupil grew larger, encroaching on the iris and engulfing the yellow specks that made for its unusual sparkle. Even if I wasn’t looking at her, I could feel her staring at me all too often, the same way as, in a small town, you can sense the inhabitants watching strangers from behind their window curtains. There was a silence deep down in Eugénie’s staring eyes. The silence of a waiting animal hidden in its burrow, making not a sound, senses on the alert.

      I sometimes wondered what this child still remembered of the tribulations following the too sudden death of our father, as if there might be, perhaps, some link between her inquisitive attitude and that absence. How could one grow up without having deep inside the memory of a father so full of life, a man who loved the hunt, who would take us on great picnics in Kent or Cornwall with other families, and play card games that lasted so long that we’d go upstairs to bed long before they’d finished? I had thought grownups didn’t sleep, that they lived on a different plane in the cloud created by their cigars. Was my little sister still invisibly imprinted with the few weeks during which she’d seen our father, had heard the voice of that man who loved the great outdoors, who continued to exist so powerfully in the lives of her older brother and sister? Had she heard his voice? What did she want from me, spying on me like that? Her silent, intense observation gave me the sense that I was entrusted with memories that I had to pass on to her.

      Animal-like, she gradually set herself to protecting the place that she considered was rightfully her territory in the rue Moncey apartment. In a few months I saw by the way she looked at me that she considered me an intruder. All I had to do was use Grandmother’s sewing basket for an instant and she would grab it, screaming and putting it back into our grandmother’s old hands with their brown spots. It did no good at all for Grandmother to tell her to give it back to me—she’d refuse. And if she saw me paying attention to my embroidery, or, worse, absorbed in reading, she’d hit the book until I’d seize on any game at all to distract her. Only then would I find my cheery and cuddly little girl again. The worst for her was hearing me speaking English with William on the rare occasions that we had the pleasure of being under the same roof. The child would start screaming “No! No!” blindly punching at both of us. Our need to rekindle and relive our complicity could only be fulfilled in the language of our early years. We refused to forget. She couldn’t stand it—any more than she could stand seeing me in conversation with our mother and our grandmother. I knew her less with every month and felt her searching eyes begin to weigh me down with accusations. It was only in her earliest years that we were really close. And always, coming from a room opening onto the hallway or at the entranceway rotunda, there would be a voice reminding me that “the eldest has to give in to the littlest, Mathilde!”

      Like so much else, I wouldn’t have been able to put words to the anxiety I felt in those days. I think that it frightened me and I chose to repress it. My only role in the apartment was to entertain the child. Avoiding her upset her and consequently upset the grownups. But it was what I really wanted to do. “Go take her a cookie!” they’d say, “Go see why she’s crying!” and I’d dash to the end of the hall where I’d find her leaning against the cupboard door as if she were counting to twenty, as when we played hide and seek . . . But she wasn’t counting, she was sniveling pitifully just loud enough for us all to hear. Sometimes our mother’s voice spoke more firmly: “Take her into the parlor or go in her room with her!” I’d soon be dragging a recalcitrant little girl by her arm and she’d be screaming as if I’d beaten her black and blue.

      How hungry I was behind the convent walls for someone who would focus sweetly and tenderly on me alone. But I found out that, on my monthly visits home, I was the one who had to do just this for the baby. In my first life, when I’d been younger, this attention had been there for me and somehow I fervently hoped that my mother would give it to me once again. I began, however, to doubt that I’d ever really known happiness. Were my memories only a dream? Even my brother was finding fulfillment somewhere else, as if disavowing our past—the past that I was huddling around like a miser bent over his treasure. William talked about how much he liked his multifaceted life: he got to spend as much time outdoors and playing chess and bridge as he did in the classroom. Had my mother not remarried, had my grandmother not stopped eating because she was driven to despair by the departure of her daughter and little granddaughter, I’d have remained in boarding school. For who knows how long? It wasn’t for my sake that they took me out of the convent, but for Grandmother’s well being. This thought brought me up short—and it hurt. It’s only now that I understand where this unceasing nostalgia comes from, and why an invisible hand draws me firmly back to the past as soon as I put down my pencil or brush and lose touch with the life that Frédéric offered me. I leapt right into it however; I know that I was destined to be with him.

      The true gathering place for the