Emma

Emma is Myriam’s friend, a mother of two, and a recurring figure through whom the novel tests the gap between respectable family ideals and the compromises made to sustain them. She offers Myriam practical advice about hiring a nanny, later envies the care Louise provides, and presents her own children as a carefully composed image of promise. Her choices and anxieties expose both the social privilege behind that image and the unease it cannot conceal.

Identity and Family

Emma has two sons and is married; her husband is often the person taking photographs of the family, rather than appearing in them. Myriam sees him as trying to enter the frame in his beard, natural-wool sweaters, and tight, uncomfortable work trousers. Emma’s family life thus has a public-facing composition: the children and their mother are displayed, while the father is assigned the role of observer, even as he makes efforts to be included.

Emma lives in the twentieth arrondissement, in a small house whose carefully chosen décor can make a visitor feel uncomfortable. The salon is crowded with ornaments and cushions, less inviting as a place to relax than effective at provoking envy. The setting reinforces the impression that her domestic world is curated for an audience as well as inhabited by a family.

Advice and Contradiction

Before Myriam hires Louise, Emma complains that the woman caring for her boys has two sons of her own and therefore cannot stay late or babysit. Emma advises Myriam to consider whether a prospective nanny has children, adding that it would be more convenient if they were back in their home country. Myriam thanks her but is disturbed by the logic: if an employer spoke about her or one of their friends that way, she thinks, they would call it discrimination. She does not raise the matter with Paul, whom she regards as sharing Emma’s pragmatism and preference for family and career.

The exchange reveals a sharp dissonance between the principles Myriam recognizes and the hiring convenience Emma recommends. The prospective worker’s own family is treated as an obstacle to an employer’s flexibility. Emma’s advice is not an abstract opinion: it belongs to the practical arrangements through which professional households secure care while expecting the caregiver’s private obligations to remain out of the way.

The Ideal Family and Its Anxieties

Emma posts near-daily, sepia-toned portraits of her two blond children playing in a park. She has enrolled them in a school where, she believes, their talents will flourish, and has given them names drawn from Norse mythology whose meanings she likes to explain. The photographs present the children as already exceptional and their future as thoughtfully arranged. Myriam, who sees these images regularly, compares Emma’s public family ideal with the strain and incompleteness she experiences in her own life.

At a gathering, Emma tells Louise that the neighborhood public school is a disaster: children spit on the ground and use insults, while pupils at the private school may swear but, she argues, know that they should do so only among themselves. She has also heard stories about parents arriving late with children in pajamas and a veiled mother refusing to shake the headmaster’s hand. Her concern about manners and schooling broadens into a fear of racial and religious difference. Emma tells Myriam that her son Odin would have been the only white child in his class and that she cannot imagine managing it if he came home invoking God and speaking Arabic. Myriam smiles rather than challenging her. The exchange makes prejudice part of an ordinary social conversation, eased by the expectation that a friend will understand.

Encounters with Louise

At the gathering, Emma finds a subject she can discuss with Louise: her children. She shares her worries, and Louise reassures her from experience, repeatedly telling her not to worry. Emma envies Myriam for having such a dependable nanny. The scene complicates Emma’s earlier advice about caregivers’ family responsibilities: she knows the benefits of dependable care firsthand, even as her hiring advice treats a nanny’s children as a problem for the employer.

Louise’s presence also changes the social arrangement of the gathering. She serves a dish that draws praise for its sauce and ginger, and for a few minutes becomes the center of attention. Paul calls her “our nanny,” speaking about her in front of her as though she belonged with the children and the elderly rather than as an equal participant. The guests soon return to their own conversation, while Louise withdraws to the kitchen and cleans. Emma’s admiration for Louise is sincere within the scene, but the surrounding performance of praise does not alter the boundary between the admired worker and the people whose home she serves.

Narrative Significance

Emma’s appearances link private convenience to broader judgments about class, race, and family. Her advice to Myriam shows how the employer’s demand for availability can make a caregiver’s own motherhood seem disqualifying; her envy of Louise shows how much the employers’ lives benefit from care that is both skilled and reliably present. The contrast is not resolved by Emma’s admiration: praise for a nanny’s usefulness can coexist with assumptions that narrow the lives of workers and their children.

Her carefully staged family photographs and her fears about the local school likewise sit side by side. The children are presented as individuals whose talents deserve cultivation, while the children and parents outside Emma’s preferred school environment become signs of disorder or threat. Through Emma, the novel shows an ideal family image being maintained not only through attention and taste but through selective distance from other people’s needs and experiences.