Louise’s obsession with a baby

Louise’s obsession with a baby is a fixation on a child who does not exist, but whom she imagines as the answer to nearly every uncertainty in her life. She pictures the infant binding her to Myriam and Paul, preserving her work in their home, and making her feel that she belongs. The fantasy begins as a tender vision of shared care; it becomes a rigid demand that reorganizes how she interprets the family and, ultimately, how she treats its children.

Origins and imagined family

The fantasy takes shape after Louise spends a night with Hervé. In the next morning’s quiet, she imagines a newborn passing from her arms to Myriam’s and then Paul’s, drawing the adults together in a shared tenderness. She envisions caring for the child herself, holding it for hours and soothing it. The baby is not only someone to love: in Louise’s imagined family, its arrival would erase misunderstandings and restore meaning to the household’s routines.

The imagined child also offers Louise a future inside the Massé home. She hopes that Mila will introduce the idea to her mother, asking the girl whether she would like a little brother or sister for the two of them to care for. When Mila asks Myriam if she is carrying a baby, Louise watches with delight. Myriam laughs and rejects the idea, but Louise reads the answer not as a settled refusal but as an expression meant to ward off the possibility. Her interpretation allows the fantasy to survive evidence that might otherwise end it.

Signs, rituals, and disappointment

Louise’s hope attaches itself to ordinary domestic details. She notices the couple’s private conversations and the way Myriam has begun to speak more quietly and close doors during phone calls. Rather than understanding these as signs of distance or private matters unrelated to her, Louise’s expectations lead her to imagine a child on the way. She tells Wafa that the baby will bring joy and more work, adding that with three children the Massés will not be able to do without her.

She tries to help produce the future she anticipates. Louise resumes cooking after a period when her food had become nearly inedible, preparing rice pudding with cinnamon, spiced soups, and other dishes reputed to encourage fertility. She watches Myriam’s appearance for signs of pregnancy and tends the couple’s laundry with heightened attention, washing Myriam’s delicate clothes by hand and reciting prayers. The household’s familiar chores become, for Louise, a private sequence of hopeful rites.

But she repeatedly encounters signs that Myriam is not pregnant. A mark on Myriam’s discarded pyjama trousers and a small drop of blood on the bathroom tiles become evidence Louise cannot reconcile with her expectation. She knows the blood recurs each month, and interprets each recurrence as the death of a child. That conclusion belongs to Louise’s fixation, not to any pregnancy disclosed by the evidence: the imagined baby is made to seem continually near and continually lost.

Security, belonging, and exclusion

Louise’s hope is inseparable from her fear of losing her place in the family. She believes that when Adam begins school in September, the house will be empty and she will have nothing to do. A new baby would supply work as well as affection, ensuring, in her view, that the Massés continued to need her. The imagined child thus becomes a guarantee of employment and belonging, even as it is also a figure of love and renewal.

The household’s employment relations provide a sharp contrast to Louise’s fantasy of intimacy. When Myriam and Paul seek a nanny, Paul draws up interview questions and rules out applicants according to nationality, immigration status, age, religion, and availability. Myriam is uncomfortable with Emma’s advice to consider whether candidates have children abroad, recognizing the discriminatory logic in excluding a woman for being a mother, though she does not raise the matter with Paul. During the interviews, Myriam also rejects Malika, a Moroccan candidate, because she fears a closeness based on shared language and religion. Louise’s own availability and apparent composure help win the job, but the hiring scene makes clear that the household’s dependence on care is structured by employers’ preferences and power.

Louise’s hope of being absorbed into the family is also set against the wider, largely unseen world of the nannies. In the neighborhood, women from different backgrounds care for children who wear similar clothes and whose names are written on their labels; some are expected to be especially punctual, gentle, and clean. They meet repeatedly in public spaces, but the families may later forget their voices, languages, and food. Louise, a white nanny whose employers praise her availability and cooking, intrigues the other women, who know little about her own life. Against this setting, her dream of becoming indispensable does not dissolve the boundary between paid care and family membership; it makes that boundary the object of her fixation.

From longing to danger

Louise’s emotional life swings between exhilaration and collapse. At moments, she imagines her future widening through summer holidays and family life; then the world seems to contract, and the Massés’ closed doors feel like barriers she wants to break through. She longs to find a place in their household, to make a home within it, but feels ashamed when hope falls away. A scene outside that family’s home provides a stark indication of how the fixation can exceed private fantasy: after Lydie’s shopping spills into the gutter, Lydie later insists that Louise deliberately tipped over her stroller, although the baby was unharmed.

By the time Louise’s thoughts turn wholly around the desired child, she has recast the existing children as the reason the Massés cannot have another. She tells herself that Mila and Adam exhaust their parents, interrupt their intimacy, and stand in the way of a baby who would secure Louise’s place. In this distorted account, the children are no longer simply those she cares for; they are obstacles to the family future she claims to want for everyone.

The change is decisive. Louise imagines the baby as a remedy for the women who criticize her, a defense against her landlord, and a means of protecting her position in the Massé household. Her longing has become so absolute that she is capable of suffocating, burning, or annihilating whatever lies between her and its satisfaction. The tenderness of the first vision has not disappeared, but it has been overtaken by possessiveness: the child is at once an object of imagined love and the instrument through which Louise expects to secure work, refuge, and a place in a family that has never promised her permanent belonging.