Irène Mougel

Irène Mougel, Anthony Casati’s aunt and the mother of his cousin, is presented through the pressures of family life rather than through a sustained account of her own decisions. She belongs to a close-knit working-class world shaped by abandoned wives, insecure employment, illness, and the decline of industrial work. Her depression has lasted for years; it has become part of how she describes her life, while her domestic complaints and uncertain position at work give that condition a daily, material setting.

Family Background and the Mougel Sisters

Irène and her sister, Hélène Casati, grew up within the same local social world and had been close when they were younger. They were known collectively as the Mougel girls: young women who went to dances and attracted attention before settling into adult relationships. Their extended family remained closely connected through weddings, funerals, and Christmas gatherings. The family’s apparent cohesion, however, coexists with a history of loss and strain. Men are described as worn down by work, drinking, or illness; women age with diminished optimism; and the family remembers sons who died in accidents as well as those who left.

That inherited pattern is part of Irène’s characterization, not simply background decoration. She is identified as one of the wives left behind, and her son appears to have grown up quickly in that household. At sixteen, he could mow the lawn, cook, and drive without a licence, and was even allowed to smoke in his bedroom. He is described as bold and self-confident. Anthony, who had followed his cousin since childhood, is drawn to that assurance, while the cousin increasingly feels alienated from the family’s expectations and ordinary disappointments. Irène’s household thus helps frame the difference between a young person learning to manage early and Anthony’s desire to get away from the limits of the world around him.

The Household and Anthony’s Visits

The cousin’s home is a narrow, two-storey row house with peeling stucco and geraniums in its windows. Irène is often encountered through the domestic atmosphere: the television fills the rooms, and when the boys return, she is watching it in the living room. She lowers the volume when Anthony comes into view and notices that he looks unwell, asking whether the boys have fought. Their silence does not lead her to press the matter. Instead, the scene shifts to the everyday concerns that occupy her attention, while the television repeatedly interrupts and redirects the conversation.

On another visit, Irène is lying on the sofa with the remote in hand. She talks about her daughter, who was expected to come dye her hair, and then moves among bills, problems with neighbours, work, a medical appointment, laundry, and ironing. Her speech ranges across the practical burdens of the household rather than settling on one problem. When something happens on television, she turns up the sound and forgets the boys; her son uses the interruption to go upstairs, and Anthony follows. The small episode shows both the crowded texture of her domestic life and the limited attention the household can give to the boys’ concerns.

Depression, Work, and Precarity

Irène’s depression is described as a long-enduring presence, spoken of almost as another member of the household. Her mood is said to depend heavily on the pills she is taking, and her talk can veer abruptly from one grievance to another. This does not reduce her to a diagnosis: the narrative places the illness alongside the pressures of money, domestic labour, family responsibility, and employment, showing how these concerns accumulate in her everyday speech.

Her work situation is unsettled. She has been away from her job for a year, and her former boss is threatening to dismiss her. She is not wholly resigned: she believes she can contact the labour inspectors if matters become worse. At the same time, she recognizes that the employer has to keep the business running, even as she resents the profits made from workers like her. That mixture of understanding and anger makes her predicament more complex than a simple opposition between worker and employer. She can see the pressures on both sides, but that recognition does not remove her own vulnerability.

A Generation Living Through Industrial Decline

The book places Irène within a wider portrait of women who, after years of worry and financial restraint, begin to claim time for themselves. Many are single, widowed, or abandoned; they travel in organized groups, visit castles and villages, go to karaoke evenings, and save together for holidays. Their outings mark a change in how they spend their lives, but the freedom arrives late, after long years of shouldering family burdens.

The same portrait recalls husbands and partners who had been unemployed, depressed, violent, or humiliated, and men whose prospects collapsed when the factories closed and the blast furnaces fell silent. Their sons, too, often caused their families worry before settling down. The crisis that shaped these lives is no longer presented as a temporary interruption but as a lasting social condition. Irène’s story belongs to that collective account: she is a particular mother with a television-filled home, a daughter who has not come by, a son who has learned to manage for himself, a threatened job, and a depression carried for years. Through her, the family’s private troubles register the wider persistence of insecurity across generations.