We were sitting on the carpet, which was littered with bits of crumpled paper, and were absorbed in a fascinating game: taking out little pebbles that 'were wrapped in white "sweet papers" and comparing them – now a glitter of quartz, now a pebble, smooth and pleasant to the touch. On each paper were written names that we had, in our ignorance, taken for enigmatic mineralogical labels: Fecamp, La Rochelle, Bayonne… In one of the wrappers we even discovered a rough and ferrous fragment, which bore traces of rust. We thought we were reading the name of this strange metal: " Verdun. "… A number of pieces from this collection had been thus stripped bare. When our grandmother came in, the game had just begun to take a livelier course. We were quarreling over the most beautiful stones and testing their hardness by striking them one against another, sometimes breaking them. Those we found ugly – like the " Verdun," for example – were thrown out of the window into a bed of dahlias. Several wrappers had been torn…

Our grandmother froze above this battlefield scattered with white blisters. We looked up. It was then that her gray eyes seemed to be on the brink of tears -just enough to make it unbearable for us if she broke down.

No, she was not an impassive goddess, our grandmother. She too, it seemed, could suffer unease, or sudden distress. We had always thought she moved in such a measured way through the peaceful sequence of days, yet she too sometimes hovered on the brink of tears!

From that summer onward my grandmother's life revealed new and unexpected facets to me. And above all, much more personal ones.

Previously her past had been summed up by a few talismans, a number of family relics, like the silk fan, which reminded me of a fine maple leaf, or the famous little "Pont-Neuf bag." Our legend maintained that it had been found on the bridge in question by Charlotte Lemonnier, aged four at the time.