Versailles is the setting of Georges Picquart’s mother’s final illness and death, transforming a place he reaches in response to a family emergency into the center of an extended bedside vigil. The hospital, home, church, and cemetery mark the passage from her injury through care and mourning, while Picquart’s repeated journeys from his office make that passage part of his daily life.

The hospital and her first decline

A personal telegram from Anna reaches Picquart at his office after his mother falls and breaks her hip. The doctors decide to anesthetize her to reset the joint and spare her pain; Anna’s message says their mother is bewildered and hysterical and asks him to come at once. Picquart hurries to Versailles, but by the time he reaches the hospital the operation is over. Anna is there with her husband, Jules Gay, and their faces tell him that the news is bad.

His mother lies turned away, shrunken and grey, with the plaster encasing her lower body seeming larger than she is. Though her eyes open when Picquart turns her face toward him, they show no recognition. The doctor explains that patients in her condition may, after an anesthetic, leave part of their minds behind in sleep. Picquart begins to shout at him, but Anna quiets him by asking what alternative they had. The scene gives the hospital a double character: it is where treatment has been performed, but also where the family first confronts the possibility that she may not return to herself.

The following day the family takes her home. On Sunday morning the bells of Saint-Louis ring for Mass, but she no longer seems to know what they mean; she even appears to have forgotten how to eat. The change from hospital to home brings her into familiar surroundings without restoring her former awareness.

The household vigil

The family hires a daytime nurse, and Picquart changes his routine: each evening he leaves the office early and returns to Versailles to sleep in the spare bedroom. Anna and Jules travel from Paris most days, while Picquart’s cousin Edmond Gast and Edmond’s wife, Jeanne, drive over from Ville-d’Avray. The house becomes a shared place of watching, with relatives and attendants keeping company beside a patient who cannot respond.

One night Picquart returns later than usual to find Pauline reading a novel aloud beside the bed. The scene briefly draws the private relationship between them into the family vigil: when Pauline puts down the book and rises to embrace him, he holds on to her and says, “This time I don’t think I’m ever going to let you go.” Versailles thus holds both the practical work of caring for his mother and a moment of intimacy that Picquart expresses in the presence of impending loss.

Death and mourning

On Friday 12 June 1896, Picquart’s mother receives the last rites. Outside, the summer street is noisy and the sunlight presses against the drawn curtains as the priest anoints her ears, eyes, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet. She dies in Picquart’s arms that night. When he kisses her goodbye, he tastes the residue of the priest’s oil, a physical detail that binds the ritual of death to the intimacy of his final farewell.

Her death has long been anticipated and the arrangements are already in place, yet the shock feels as great as if she had died without warning. After the requiem Mass at Saint-Louis and her burial in a corner of the cemetery, the family returns to her apartment for the wake. The small rooms are crowded and tense; Picquart and his sister-in-law Hélène, his late brother Paul’s widow, make efforts to avoid each other. Eventually he finds himself in his mother’s old bedroom, with its mattress stripped, talking to Pauline’s husband. The movement through Versailles ends not in a single, unified scene of mourning but in a cramped household where grief, family strain, and the obligations of ordinary conversation meet.