L’hiver

Winter functions as a recurring pressure on the novel’s human world: in March, the cold seems endless as Louise learns that Stéphanie has been expelled, and later the winter night presses in again as Louise leads Mila away from familiar streets. The season joins institutional rejection to domestic violence, then turns an ordinary outing into a landscape of mounting uncertainty.

Lingering Cold and Expulsion

In March, winter has overstayed its season. The cold seems as if it will never end when a school counselor offers Louise help with administrative matters, still leaving her to grasp the decision: Stéphanie is being expelled. The school has deliberated for barely ten minutes. Its teacher describes Stéphanie as disruptive and says the staff have exhausted their methods and cannot let her hold an entire class hostage; he suggests she might thrive in a neighborhood closer to home, among familiar surroundings.

The return journey carries the decision into the family’s private life. On the bus, Louise remains silent while Stéphanie glances out the window, earbuds in, and then slows to look at the market stalls. Louise reads her daughter’s apparent ease as adolescent selfishness. In the gray street leading to Jacques’s house, she grabs Stéphanie by the sleeve, and the anger she has carried home becomes physical violence: behind the small garden gate, Louise beats her daughter, strikes her face, pulls her hair, and claws her until she bleeds. The cold March setting does not explain the assault, but it frames the expulsion and its aftermath as a passage from institutional rejection into an intimate eruption of force.

Night Returns

Winter reappears when Louise finally leaves the restaurant with Mila and the sleeping Adam in his stroller. She adjusts Adam’s blanket; as darkness falls, the winter that had been lying in wait slips under their clothes. The small act of tucking in the child sits beside the chill that makes the night feel newly exposed.

Louise takes Mila’s hand and walks for a long time through a Paris from which, in the child’s perception, all the other children have vanished. They pass the crowded Grands Boulevards, theaters, and cafés, then continue into narrower, darker streets. The route grows unfamiliar to Mila: yellow streetlights illuminate sidewalks, and occasional squares hold young people smoking beside bins. Louise keeps moving and offers no reassurance beyond a brief invitation to keep up.

Seasonal Pressure and Disorientation

The two winter scenes differ in their immediate action, but both place a child’s vulnerability beside Louise’s forceful presence. Stéphanie’s return from school ends in a beating; Mila’s nighttime walk unfolds as anxiety and loss of familiar bearings. Mila wonders whether she is still in the same city, whether home is visible from there, and whether her parents know where she is. Winter’s cold is thus concrete, entering clothing after dark, while also sharpening the distance between the security children expect and the uncertainty Louise creates.

The season’s recurrence gives the narrative a bleak rhythm rather than a sense of renewal. In March, the cold seems incapable of ending; later, night allows it to reclaim the streets. Between those moments, winter marks situations in which care and safety are unsettled: a school’s failure to contain Stéphanie’s difficulties, a mother’s violence, and a nanny’s silent lead through a city Mila no longer recognizes.