How could the thought not occur to me when I had seen, plucked and tasted my first peach and apricot on their terrace, not to speak of my first muscat grapes and mirabelle plums? In the evenings we sat outside enjoying the cool air and watching fireflies swoop. Sometimes a storm on distant mountains lit snowy peaks with pink and green lightning. Sometimes, earlier in the day, we bicycled down to Aix-les-Bains on the Lac du Bourget or up to high pasture lands, where the tinkling of cowbells was the only sound, or else equipped ourselves with baskets and dispersed into the woods to collect boletus mushrooms and wild strawberries. It was a paradise, I wrote in my letters home. All that first summer I held to this view. Quarrels were muted, and it was only in my second year that I began to tune into tensions reverberating just out of earshot. In my third one, a few things grew clear. Claude, the beloved ‘little mother’, had spent a month in Pau, on the other side of France, looking after an ailing aunt, and there had met a perfectly suitable man.
