… We'd sleep together there Till the world comes to an end.

This slumber of the two lovers, of such long duration, was beyond my childish comprehension. I already knew that people who died (like that old woman next door whose disappearance in winter had been so well explained to me) went to sleep forever. Like the lovers in the song? Love and death had now formed a strange alloy in my young head. And the melancholy beauty of the melody could only increase this unease. Love, death, beauty… And the evening sky, the wind, the smell of the steppe that, thanks to the song, I perceived as if my life had just begun at that moment.

The second memory was so distant it could not be dated. There was not even a very precise "me" in its nebulousness. Just the intense sensation of light, the aromatic scent of plants, and silvery lines crossing the blue density of the air, which many years later I would identify as gossamer threads. Elusive and confused, this vision would nevertheless be dear to me, for I would succeed in persuading myself that it was a memory from before birth. Yes, an echo sent to me by my French ancestry. For in one of my grandmother's stories I was to rediscover all the elements of this memory: the autumn sun of a journey she made to Provence, the scent of the fields of lavender, and even those gossamers floating in the perfumed air. I would never dare to speak to her of my childish prescience. It was in the course of the following summer that my sister and I one day saw our grandmother weep… for the first time in our lives.

In our eyes she was a kind of just and benevolent deity, always true to form and perfectly serene. Her own life story, which had long since become a myth, placed her beyond the griefs of ordinary mortals. In fact we did not see any tears. Just an unhappy contraction of her lips, little tremors running across her cheeks, and a rapid batting of her eyelashes…