Pascal

Pascal is Myriam’s former law-school classmate and, after an accidental reunion, the lawyer who offers her a route back into the profession. He becomes her colleague and demanding mentor, giving her substantial responsibility and recognizing the force of her work. Their relationship is marked by intellectual and professional affinity, but also by an ambiguous rivalry and a brief, charged intimacy; through it, the novel shows how Myriam’s career can feel at once like a recovered self and a new source of conflict at home.

Identity and Introduction

Before Myriam returns to legal practice, Pascal appears in her life as a figure from the future she thought she had lost. She encounters him by chance at a carousel while Mila refuses to get off her horse. Myriam is dressed in an oversized pair of trousers and worn boots, with her dirty hair tied up; Pascal does not recognize her immediately. As they walk together, he tells her about the firm he has established with two former classmates, including the difficulties and pleasures of working for himself. Myriam listens intently while Mila interrupts and Myriam searches her pockets and bag for a sweet to quiet her.

The meeting leaves Myriam acutely exposed. Pascal barely attends to the children and does not ask their names, while she worries that he has noticed her worn clothes and neglected appearance. After he enters a building, she imagines that he may mock the life she has fallen into. At home, the uncomplicated routines of caring for Mila and Adam do not dispel her sense of confinement. The next day, however, Pascal sends a text asking whether she has considered returning to law and suggesting that they discuss it. Myriam’s joy is immediate: she leaps around the apartment and kisses Mila. The text converts an encounter she had experienced as humiliating into a practical opening.

Professional Relationship and Myriam’s Return

Pascal welcomes Myriam to his practice and gives her an office connected to his by a door they often leave open. Within two or three weeks, he entrusts her with responsibilities that older associates have never received. Over the following months, she handles dozens of clients’ cases independently, from minor criminal matters and drunk-driving arrests to debt problems, bank-card fraud, and identity theft. Pascal encourages her to gain experience and make use of her formidable capacity for work; she accepts every file he gives her and does not complain about finishing late.

His confidence is not merely an invitation back into a workplace but a demanding test of ability. Pascal expects Myriam to find new clients and devote time to legal aid. Twice a month she travels to the Bobigny courthouse, where she can wait until nine in the evening for cases. She studies case records late into the night, looking for the smallest procedural error and preparing herself to know each file by heart. Her work can make her impatient with bewildered clients, but she persists, and former clients recommend her to others. Pascal’s repeated praise that she is perfect accompanies a professional relationship in which encouragement and pressure are closely bound together.

Ambition, Recognition, and Intimacy

Pascal seems to understand Myriam’s hunger for recognition and for challenges commensurate with her abilities. Between them, the narrative describes a contest with an ambiguous pleasure: he pushes her, she holds her ground; he exhausts her, and she does not disappoint him. Their relationship therefore exceeds a simple arrangement between employer and employee. Pascal provides an arena in which Myriam’s capacity can be exercised and recognized, while their rivalry keeps that recognition unsettled, something to be earned again through work.

After Myriam has been at the firm for six months, Pascal invites her for a drink. They walk silently to a bistro, share wine, discuss a current case, and then reminisce about their student years: a friend’s party in a townhouse and another student’s panic before oral examinations. Myriam drinks quickly and laughs with him. She does not want to go home or to have anyone waiting for her, but Paul and the children are there. The scene gives her a rare desire that feels detached from the demands of motherhood and marriage. She still loves Paul, yet the history of pregnancy and childbirth has made their shared bodily life feel heavy with memory. Pascal’s company briefly makes professional and personal possibility seem open again, without resolving the obligations to which Myriam returns.

Colleague, Not Patron

Pascal’s place in Myriam’s life becomes visible at a family celebration. Myriam has a major case from him that she is on course to win through an astute, tenacious defense, while Paul is excited about a new opportunity to produce a well-known singer’s next record. Paul insists that Louise stay for dinner, declaring that there is much to celebrate. When Myriam introduces Louise to Pascal as her boss, Pascal laughs and corrects her: they work together; they are colleagues. The correction is warm and emphatic, and it complicates the hierarchy Pascal’s authority might otherwise imply. He has brought Myriam into his practice and gives her work, but he presents their relationship as one of professional partnership rather than simple subordination.

Courtroom Work and Professional Method

Pascal’s influence is especially clear in the legal principle he teaches Myriam: maintaining the proper distance from a client. In preparation for a serious trial, she assists him for more than a month on the case of a twenty-four-year-old accused of joining three accomplices in a punitive attack on two Sri Lankan cooks. The attackers, under the influence of alcohol and cocaine, beat the men; one died, and the assailants realized they had attacked the wrong person. A surveillance recording helped establish what happened.

At their first meeting with the defendant, he tells a story full of lies and obvious exaggerations, even attempting to charm Myriam while facing the possibility of life imprisonment. Myriam follows Pascal’s insistence on the proper distance: she tests the account methodically against the evidence and tells the defendant that lying is a poor defense and that he has nothing to lose by telling the truth. For trial, she buys him a new shirt and advises him to abandon the tasteless jokes and smirk that make him look defiant. Her explanation of the defense is unsentimental: the lawyers must establish that he, too, is a victim. In court, she questions two experts about his psychology and listens as one of the victims testifies through an interpreter. The testimony is halting, the emotion in the room palpable, and the accused keeps his eyes lowered. Pascal’s method does not spare Myriam the moral pressure of representing a violent defendant; it gives her a disciplined way to work amid that pressure.

Limits and Significance

Pascal’s professional support does not resolve the demands Myriam faces outside the firm. When he first offers her work, Paul reacts with surprise that she wants a job and asks how they will manage the children. They eventually choose to hire a nanny, but Paul remarks that, after overtime and childcare costs, Myriam and the nanny will earn roughly the same amount. Myriam is left with bitterness at the way he treats her ambitions as an impractical calculation. The contrast gives Pascal’s offer its weight: he recognizes a professional self in Myriam that her husband has not fully acknowledged, while the family’s practical arrangements still make her return to work contingent on care performed by another woman.

Pascal remains a colleague rather than a rescuer. His text opens the door, his confidence gives Myriam consequential cases, and his demanding standards help shape her courtroom practice; none of that removes the strain between work, marriage, and childcare. Through him, professional recognition becomes both a source of exhilaration and a pressure point in Myriam’s domestic life.