Sylvie

Sylvie, Paul’s mother, is a grandmother whose wish to free her grandchildren from anxious, rule-bound urban life collides with her contempt for Myriam’s reliance on work and a nanny. Her relationship with Myriam is shaped by practical friction, an old drunken confrontation, and incompatible accounts of what women owe their children; beneath their quarrels lies Sylvie’s disappointment in the constricted life she believes her son and grandchildren have inherited.

Family Life and Differences

After Mila’s birth, Paul’s parents helped the young family, but increasingly spent time at their country home, where substantial renovations were underway. A month before Myriam was due to give birth to Adam, they arranged a three-week trip to Asia and told Paul only at the last moment. He complained to Myriam about his parents’ selfishness and carelessness. Myriam, however, felt relieved: she could not bear having Sylvie underfoot. She listened to her mother-in-law’s advice with a smile, swallowing her irritation when Sylvie inspected the refrigerator and criticized its contents.

Their domestic styles sharpened the conflict. Sylvie bought organic salads and prepared Mila’s meals, but left the kitchen in appalling disorder. She and Myriam seemed unable to agree on anything; the apartment held a dense, simmering unease that seemed ready to erupt. Myriam eventually told Paul that his parents were right to enjoy their freedom while they still could, even as the household’s practical dependence on help made that freedom a source of tension.

Two Visions of Child-Rearing

At the country house, still cold and partly under renovation, Myriam was frightened by the unsafe surroundings: the kitchen ceiling threatened to collapse and bare electrical wires hung in the bathroom. She followed the children anxiously, interrupting their play to add clothes or check Adam’s breathing. Sylvie, by contrast, wanted them to recover the wildness and imagination she felt Myriam’s vigilance denied them. She did not impose rules or shower them with frivolous gifts to compensate for parental absences; she also spoke without carefully weighing her words, drawing repeated reprimands from Paul and Myriam.

To provoke her daughter-in-law, Sylvie called the children “my little birds fallen from the nest.” She mourned their urban surroundings, with their incivility and pollution, and wanted to widen the horizons of children she feared would grow into dutiful, timid adults. Her indulgence was not simply permissiveness: it expressed a political and generational objection to a life organized around conformity, caution, and work. Myriam’s anxious protection and Sylvie’s appetite for freedom thus turn ordinary caregiving decisions into a contest over what kind of future the children should inhabit.

The Confrontation with Myriam

The antagonism had a defining history. Months earlier, after both women had drunk too much, Myriam had sought sympathy from Sylvie. She complained that she scarcely saw her children and that her frenetic life offered her no respite. Sylvie did not comfort her. Instead, she attacked Myriam for devoting too much time to her profession, calling her irresponsible and selfish, and counted the work trips Myriam had taken while Adam was ill and Paul was finishing an album.

Sylvie blamed Myriam for the children’s difficult behavior and drew Louise into the accusation, dismissing her as a makeshift nanny and substitute mother on whom Myriam relied out of complacency and cowardice. Myriam cried; Paul, stunned, said nothing. Sylvie raised her arms and rebuked Myriam for crying rather than accepting what she called the truth. Myriam later remembered the scene as an assault, with accusations she knew were partly true but understood as burdens shared by many women. What remained painful was not only the criticism but the absence of indulgence, tenderness, or advice offered woman to woman and mother to mother.

The scene also exposes the contradiction in Sylvie’s judgment. She condemns Myriam for working and being absent from her children, though Sylvie herself worked throughout Paul’s childhood and had long taken pride in her independence. Her criticism lands with force precisely because it draws on a real conflict in Myriam’s life, but it is not a neutral principle consistently applied: it becomes a weapon between women whose own histories and expectations do not align.

Politics, Disillusionment, and Paul

For years Sylvie repeated stories about her youth, past commitments, and revolutionary companions. With age she learned to restrain herself, and recognized that others were indifferent to her theories about a corrupt, foolish world fed on screens and slaughterhouse meat. She still believed that her generation had once sought a revolution led by both sexes and imagined a world unlike the one in which her grandchildren were growing up—a world in which people would have time to live. Dominique, her husband, gently called their old political hopes naïve; Sylvie conceded the word but insisted that they had been less stupid.

Her politics feed her grief about Paul. She laments what she sees as his transformation from a free little boy into a man under his wife’s sway, enslaved to her appetite for money and vanity. Dominique listens to her disappointments but counters that women are capitalists like anyone else. Sylvie’s account of Paul therefore joins personal hurt to a broader disillusionment: she sees the family’s career-driven, money-conscious life as evidence that the freer society she once hoped for has failed to arrive.

Grandmotherhood and Narrative Significance

Sylvie is not simply the permissive counterweight to Myriam. Her desire to give the children freedom coexists with harsh judgments of the woman whose working life resembles her own. The contrast is clearest when Myriam, after pacing the kitchen with her phone and threatening to return to Paris, softens enough to take the children outside. She still bundles them in three layers of sweaters, scarves, and gloves; Sylvie has brought out two old sleds that belonged to Paul and his brother Patrick. Watching the children race down a snowy slope, Myriam makes an effort not to worry. The moment briefly brings Sylvie’s wish for their unruliness into view without resolving the conflict over who gets to define their care.

Through Sylvie, the novel gives generational disagreement a material setting: the refrigerator she searches, the disorder left in the kitchen, the unfinished country house, the layers of winter clothes, and the inherited sleds. She wants the children to escape both the city’s constraints and the cautious habits of their parents, but her own accusations reproduce another form of constraint, demanding that Myriam answer for the cost of her ambition. Sylvie’s position is consequently unsettled: she is at once a critic of conventional domestic expectations and an enforcer of maternal blame, a disappointed political idealist and a grandmother trying to preserve a freedom she believes her family has lost.