Running ahead of her mother, the little girl had stopped suddenly and exclaimed, "A bag!" And more than half a century later, the muted echo of her ringing cry could still be heard in a town lost amid the endlessness of Russia, under the sun of the steppes. It was in this pigskin bag, with enamel plaques on the fastening, that my grandmother kept her collection of stones from days gone by.

This old handbag marked one of my grandmother's earliest memories, and for us, the genesis of the legendary world of her memory: Paris, the Pont-Neuf… An astonishing galaxy waiting to be born, which began to sketch its still hazy outlines before our fascinated gaze.

There was, besides, among these relics of the past (I remember the voluptuousness with which we caressed the smooth, gilded edges of those pink volumes, Memoirs of a Poodle, Gribouille and His Sister…), an even older testimony. The photo, already taken in Siberia; Albertine, Norbert, and – in front of them, on one of those artificial pieces of furniture that photographers always use, a kind of very tall pedestal table – Charlotte, a child of two, wearing a lace-trimmed bonnet and a doll's dress. This photo on thick cardboard, with the name of the photographer and replicas of the medals he had been awarded, intrigued us very much: "What does she have in common, this ravishing woman with her pure, fine face, framed in silky curls, with that old man, whose beard is divided into two rigid plaits that look like the tusks of a walrus?"

We already knew that this old man, our great-grandfather, was twenty-six years older than Albertine. "It's as if he'd married his own daughter!" my sister said to me indignantly.