Their marriage seemed to us ambiguous and unhealthy. All our textbooks at school were full of stories that told of marriages between girls without dowries and rich old men, miserly and hungry for youth, to such an extent that any other kind of conjugal alliance seemed to us impossible in bourgeois society. We strove to discover some malign viciousness in Nor-bert's features, a grimace of ill-concealed satisfaction. But his face remained simple and frank, like those of the intrepid explorers in the illustrations to our Jules Verne books. After all, this old man with a long white beard was only forty-eight at the time…

As for Albertine, supposed victim of bourgeois morality, she was soon to be standing on the slippery brink of an open grave into which the first spadefuls of earth were already flying. She would struggle so violently against the hands that restrained her and would utter such heartrending cries that even the funeral party of Russians, in that cemetery in a distant Siberian town, would be stunned by them. Accustomed as they were to tragic outbursts at funerals in their native land, to torrential tears and pitiful lamentations, these people would be stricken in the face of the tortured beauty of this young Frenchwoman. She would flail above the grave, crying out in her resonant language, "Throw me in as well! Throw me in!"

For a long time this terrible lament echoed in our childish ears.

"Perhaps it was because she… she loved him," my sister, who was older than me, said to me one day. And she blushed.

But more than that unusual union between Norbert and Albertine, it was Charlotte, in this photo from the turn of the century, who aroused my curiosity. Especially her little bare toes. By a simple irony of chance, or through some involuntary coquetry, she had curled them back tightly against the soles of her feet. This trifling detail conferred a special significance on what was overall a very ordinary photo. Not knowing how to formulate my thought, I contented myself with repeating in a dreamy voice, "This little girl who finds herself, heaven knows why, on this comical pedestal table, on that summer's day that has gone forever, July 22, 1905, right in the depths of Siberia.