Louise and Adam

Louise and Adam’s relationship is built through the repetitive intimacy of childcare: Louise prepares his meals, watches his small achievements, and becomes a constant presence whose voice and movements he recognizes. Yet the closeness is profoundly unequal. Adam depends on her for comfort and routine, while Louise’s desire to be needed turns care into possessiveness and, eventually, a source of danger. The relationship’s decisive horror lies in the way ordinary acts of tending—watching, bathing, feeding, calling the children to the bathroom—can no longer be separated from control and violence.

Identity and Early Care

From her first day in the Massé home, Louise takes in the household with the attention of a commander surveying territory. Myriam’s instructions include the appliances, objects she treasures, and Paul’s vinyl collection, which the children must not touch; Louise listens silently and observes every room. Soon she has transformed the disorderly apartment into an immaculate home, mending clothes, washing dusty curtains, changing the bedsheets weekly, and keeping a flower-covered notebook of the children’s schedules, medical appointments, and medicines. Her care of Adam is part of a larger reordering: she makes the household run so smoothly that the parents come to rely on her presence.

The work is not confined to the tasks formally assigned to her. When Myriam returns late, Louise may already have settled the children and prepared dinner. One evening, even after Myriam tells her she can go home, Louise continues cleaning the bath, folding towels, emptying the washing machine, and preparing the children’s beds. When Myriam tries to take a saucepan from her, Louise keeps hold of it and gently sends her to rest, insisting she will cook for the children and that Myriam will hardly notice her. The scene captures the paradox of Louise’s care: she is attentive to the family’s needs, but her growing indispensability also makes it easier for the parents to surrender more of their responsibilities to her.

Adam is among the first to respond to Louise’s return after an absence. Myriam opens the apartment door at 7:30 in the morning, and Mila runs to Louise, exclaiming that she is back. In Myriam’s arms, Adam struggles toward the nanny; he recognizes her voice, the talcum-powder scent she carries, and the light sound of her step on the parquet floor. Myriam, smiling, offers him to Louise’s embrace. His response registers how thoroughly Louise has entered his world: she is not simply a person who performs tasks, but a familiar presence he recognizes through sound, smell, and movement.

Play, Trust, and Fear

Louise’s relationship with the children also takes shape in elaborate games. She invents detailed settings and storylines, prepares costumes and scenes, and urges Mila to begin when the child loses interest. But Louise’s favorite game, hide-and-seek, has no counting and no agreed rules. She disappears without warning, hides where she can keep watching the children, and stays motionless while they look for her. Adam follows his sister’s excitement at first, laughing so hard that he falls repeatedly onto his bottom.

The game changes when Louise refuses to come out. Adam cries and calls for her, unable to understand why she does not answer. Mila’s fear grows into the conviction that Louise may have abandoned them in the apartment, where night will fall and they will be alone. Louise watches from hiding while both children become distressed. Even when they sob and plead, she remains still; the narrative likens her observation of their panic to studying a fish dying on a boat’s floor. The episode makes a pointed contrast between the children’s trust in their caregiver and Louise’s ability to turn that trust into an instrument of fear. Her physical closeness to them does not guarantee responsiveness to their distress.

The danger of that imbalance surfaces again when Mila wanders away. After an unknown older woman returns the girl, Louise hugs Mila tightly, at first appearing relieved and affectionate. But she squeezes until Mila says she cannot breathe. Holding her fast, Louise warns that Mila must never go away again and describes a stranger who might take her, hide her, and keep her from her parents. The threat frightens Mila; when Louise starts to put her down, the girl bites her shoulder until it bleeds. Neither tells Myriam what happened. Their silence becomes a secret shared by both, but it does not resolve the conflict: each now has a grievance against the other. What might look like protection has become coercion, and the child’s bite is an act of resistance to being held and terrorized.

Daily Intimacy and Unequal Dependence

The tenderness between Louise and Adam is also conveyed through his ordinary bids for attention. Louise loves watching him turn toward her to show his progress and joys, as if each gesture were meant for her alone. She longs to take in the children’s innocence and their excitement at discovering how things work, even as she understands that their pleasure demands repetition. Adam’s look to her makes the intimacy feel reciprocal, but its meaning is not equal: he seeks an adult’s attention, while Louise invests his dependence with a private significance that intensifies her attachment.

Louise’s place in the household expands while remaining difficult to name. She arrives earlier and leaves later; sometimes, after returning from an evening out with the parents, she falls asleep on their sofa and begins sleeping there once or twice a week. Myriam feels both guilty about the hours and secretly pleased by the extra housework, apologizing for taking advantage of Louise’s kindness. Louise replies that she is there for that purpose. This arrangement helps explain why Adam’s dependence and Louise’s attachment grow within the same domestic structure: the family’s reliance on her is practical and continual, while the care she gives exceeds a clear working boundary.

Her intimacy with the children has physical, private routines too. Louise uses the Massé apartment to shower each day, placing her clothes on the couple’s bed and crossing the living room naked to reach the bathroom. She leaves the door open so she can hear Adam, who is sitting on the floor and, she believes, will not betray her secret. She waits beneath the hot water, then massages her legs and arms with Myriam’s creams, walks barefoot in a towel, and hides her own towel under a pile in a cupboard. These details show how the household has become, for Louise, a place of private belonging as well as employment, and how Adam is drawn into the intimacy of her routines simply by being there.

Exhaustion, Threat, and the Bath

The warmth of Louise’s early care gives way to exhaustion. Her stories lose their shape; Mila asks her to find something else, and Louise cannot. She laughs less and puts little energy into games, although she still loves the children and watches them for hours. Meanwhile, she leaves the television on despite Myriam’s prohibition, and Mila learns not to repeat in front of her parents the frightening words she hears in the news. Louise refuses to take the children to the square; they grow restless and beg to go outside, while she remains fixed on the screen.

The children’s constant demands begin to feel unbearable to her. Mila asks the same question again and again; songs, stories, games, and faces must be repeated, and Louise feels she has no indulgence left for tears, caprices, or excited joy. She sometimes imagines putting her fingers around Adam’s neck and shaking him until he faints, then drives the thought away. The text presents the thought as part of a dark, encompassing change in her emotional condition: Louise acknowledges that she no longer knows how to love and that her capacity for tenderness is spent. Adam, once the child whose every milestone she wanted to witness, becomes a focus of an impulse she must forcibly suppress.

After the murders, Nina Dorval reconstructs the household’s final routine, asking Paul whether the children liked water and whether they normally enjoyed bathing. Louise’s summons is recalled in the plain language of care: “Les enfants, venez. Vous allez prendre un bain.” Nina imagines repeating the actions herself—opening the tap, testing the water with her hand as she once did for her own sons—before entering the apartment to reenact the crime. In the reconstruction, she moves through the cluttered rooms and the familiar circuits of Louise’s labor, then takes a knife from a cupboard and drinks a glass of wine by the open window. The bath thus becomes the relationship’s terrible endpoint: a routine associated with care and bodily trust is placed at the threshold of murder. Adam’s history with Louise cannot be reduced either to affection or to menace; its tragedy is that the same domestic closeness that made her a source of comfort also gave her access to the children and to the rituals through which they depended on her.