Banished from the kitchen, I found it hard to get to sleep right away, fascinated by the question that kept returning to my young mind: "Why are they so keen on talking about Charlotte?"

At first I thought I understood why this Frenchwoman was an ideal topic of conversation for my parents and their guests. For it only took memories of the last war to be mentioned for an argument to break out. My father, who had spent four years at the front in the infantry, attributed the victory to those troops mired in the earth who, in his phrase, had irrigated this earth with their blood, from Stalingrad to Berlin. His brother, without wishing to upset him, would then observe that, "as everyone knows," the artillery was the ruling goddess of modern war. The debate would become heated. Little by little the artillerymen would find themselves being labeled "funks," and the infantry, on account of the mud on the roads in war, became the "infectionary" It would be at this moment that their best friend, an ex-fighter pilot, would intervene with his own arguments, and the conversation would plunge into an extremely perilous nosedive. And that was before they went into the respective merits of the fronts they had been on, all three different; let alone the role of Stalin during the war…

This arguing, I sensed, pained them greatly. For they knew that, whatever their own part in the victory had been, the die was cast: their own generation, decimated, massacred, would soon disappear, along with the foot soldier, the gunner, and the pilot. And my mother would precede even them, in accordance with the fate of children born at the beginning of the twenties. At fifteen I would be left alone with my sister. It was as if in their arguments there was an unspoken foreknowledge of this immediate future… Charlotte 's life, I believed, reconciled them, offering a neutral territory.