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matter of protocol and consternation, all tender signs of affection nipped in the bud. I can still see those two old people in the dining room of the school lodgings. My grandmother Clara was a tall, pallid woman with sunken cheeks, the image of uneasy death, resigned but impassioned, a curious mix of such vibrant, lively expressions playingover a death mask. Her long, frail hands clasped her skinny knees; the line of her lips, which remained impeccable however thinned by age, stretched into a smile when she looked at me, a vague smile of unspeakable nostalgia no doubt, but also the sharp, seductive smile of a young woman. I feared the acuity of her large, very blue eyes, sorrowful and pretty, that lingered on me, studied me as though to fix my features indelibly in her old memory. Under that gaze, perhaps my discomfort grew from what I guessed it held: her tenderness was not directed at me alone, it searched beyond the child’s face for the features of the false dead, my father – a look both vampirish and maternal; and that ambivalence disturbed me as did the keen judgment that, rightly or wrongly, I attributed to this imposing individual, frightening and charming, familiar with the mysteries to which her unusual first name and her vocation’s magic title destined her: sage-femme , wise woman, or mid-wife, though in Mourioux I had no idea yet what that meant, and the title, it seemed to me, belonged exclusively to her.
    She almost completely eclipsed the figure of my grandfather, Eugène – although without subjecting him to that prattling, sour condescension by which certain wives circumvent their husbands, refusing to let them speak, think, and finally, live. No, what made my grandmother dominant and dominate him in my eyes, I think, was the fact and the painful disproportion of her vivacious spirit in contrast to the good-natured awkwardness, the smiling, kindly obtuseness of my grandfather, to which was added an unbelievably plebeian appearance, a likeable homely face: a bad – though pleasing – match for the clerical refinement of his companion. I was not afraid of him; he disconcerted me no more than Félix’s cronies, gathered at the table over their wine.I “quite liked him”; but if I ever loved one of the two, I believe it was Clara, whose vague, sorrowful eyes – hardly grazing things and nevertheless taking them in with their caress, their heavy, regretful pauses immediately cut short – wrung my heart.
    On this subject, I see that in my childhood I could only ever admire women, at least within my family, in which no “father” could have been a model for me – and even the imaginary fathers I substituted for my own were pale figures: a too-talkative teacher, a too-taciturn family friend, whom I will mention again. But, jumping back a generation and becoming the son of another century, of the past, could I not have transferred the paternal image onto my grandfathers? No doubt I did so, and what further proof of it do I need than these pages, which, one after another, try to beget themselves from the past; no doubt I wanted to do so, although I have no grounds for congratulating myself on this fictive aging; the fact is that for both the maternal and paternal branches of my family, the women were incomparably superior intellectually to the men.
    The disparity between Clara and Eugène repeated itself, if less dramatically, in Elise and Félix; although Félix’s relative dimness was more likely the effect of temperament, a touchy, confused impulsiveness, slightly egotistical and careless, that obscured his judgment, rather than a fundamental insufficiency in the judgment itself – as I believe was the case with my Mazirat grandfather. Still it is true that his garrulous, easily mired thinking seemed to me no match for Elise’s mental agility (she was remarkably concise sometimes, although unlike Félix, she had an aversion for