Créteil is where Louise rents a furnished studio after her husband Jacques dies and she is expelled from their home. The suburb frames the distance between her precarious private life and her daily work for the Massé family: she can imagine herself among them, but returning to her own apartment brings silence, isolation, and the labor of making a temporary room livable.

Louise’s Studio and Displacement

After weeks of wandering following Jacques’s death and her expulsion, Louise needs a nest. An Henri-Mondor Hospital nurse who has taken a liking to her helps her find a studio in Créteil. The landlord asks for few guarantees and accepts cash, conditions that make the apartment accessible to Louise but also underscore how limited her security is. It is furnished, and she has changed none of its decoration; the green ceiling light, which she considers ugly, is among the objects she inherits rather than chooses.

On the Saturday after the Massés return from Greece, Louise lies on the sofa until ten, staring at dust gathered on the green lamp. Then she sets a chair beneath it and scrubs until she nearly tears it from the ceiling. By eleven she has cleaned the windows inside and out and washed the shutters. Her shoes stand polished in a line along the wall. The concentrated cleaning gives shape to a morning in an apartment whose furnishings and appearance do not feel like her own.

Distance from the Massé Family

Louise’s commute begins before daylight. From Créteil she walks to the RER, changes at Auber, waits on the platform, then walks up Rue Lafayette and along Rue d’Hauteville to reach the Massé family. The route is described as a march she makes at any cost, an image that makes her attachment to the household inseparable from physical effort. Créteil is not merely a residential address: it is the far end of a daily passage toward the family whose home gives her work and a sense of belonging.

After the family’s delayed flight back to Paris, Louise says formal goodbyes to the children, holding and kissing them for a long time and telling their parents to call if they need anything. She then walks toward the RER alone. The train is empty; its stations and the surrounding buildings strike her as hostile. She recalls Greek beaches, sunsets, and meals by the sea as she travels back to Créteil. When she opens the door to her studio, her hands tremble and she struggles to contain the pain that rises in her.

Waiting at Home

The contrast between Louise’s workday and her hours in Créteil becomes especially clear on Saturdays. She hopes the Massés might call while they are out at lunch. Mila has told her about the brasserie where the family eats: Mila can order what she wants, while Adam tastes a little mustard or lemon from a spoon under his parents’ affectionate attention. Louise imagines being seated between the children, adjusting Mila’s large napkin and feeding Adam, while Paul and Myriam talk around her. In that imagined scene, she feels at ease; the restaurant’s noise would spare her the silence she fears at home.

She dresses in a blue dress fastened with small blue beads, ready in case the family needs her to join them at short notice. She knows they may have forgotten both how far away she lives and how long the return journey takes. In the kitchen of the studio, she taps her fingernails on the formica table. The address that shelters her is also the place from which she waits to be summoned back toward the family.

The Suburb and Domestic Labor

Créteil’s significance extends beyond Louise’s individual apartment. The novel places it within a wider geography of domestic work, in which caregivers travel between their own constrained circumstances and employers’ homes. The Massés’ recruitment process exposes the inequalities built into that employment: Paul’s prepared interview schedule includes exclusions based on immigration status and expectations that a nanny be available so the parents can work. Myriam is uneasy about Emma’s advice to avoid hiring a caregiver with children, yet she also refuses to employ a Maghrebi candidate because she fears a shared language and background might create unwanted familiarity.

Other women’s accounts make the pressures surrounding this work concrete. Wafa, who has no papers, describes arriving in France through a relationship with an older man and later agreeing to a sham marriage for twenty thousand euros; in her present job, her employers pay for a room nearby, but she says that in exchange she can never refuse them. In the neighborhood, caregivers of different origins and languages gather around children in parks and playgrounds, while those who have disappeared from a household can leave little lasting trace. Against this broader pattern, Louise’s room in Créteil marks both her separation from the employers’ family and her dependence on the work that draws her across the city.