Interdiction de laisser les enfants regarder la télévision

The prohibition on letting the children watch television is a clear limit set by Myriam, but Louise eventually ignores it. The reversal—from attentive, indispensable caregiver to an adult fixed before the screen while the children watch violent news and drift unsupervised through the apartment—makes the broken rule a concrete sign of her growing withdrawal and the collapse of ordinary care.

The Rule and the Household Routine

Myriam’s instruction is straightforward: the children are not to be left in front of the television. Earlier, Louise’s care is defined by almost the opposite posture. She takes hold of tasks Myriam cannot manage after a late day, insists that Myriam rest, and promises to prepare the children’s dinner so unobtrusively that Myriam will hardly notice her. The television rule belongs to this household arrangement of delegated care: Myriam sets boundaries, while Louise is trusted to maintain the children’s daily life within them.

The contrast matters because Louise’s work has become both invisible and indispensable. She prepares the children’s beds, does the laundry, and continues household tasks even when Myriam tells her she can go home. The rule is one of the few explicit limits within a relationship increasingly organized around Louise taking on more. Its later breach shows that the smoothness of the routine does not mean the boundary is secure.

The Prohibition Is Broken

After the attacks, Myriam has forbidden Louise to leave the children watching television. Louise nevertheless keeps the set on throughout the day, watching apocalyptic reports, foolish programs, and game shows whose rules she does not fully understand. Mila watches the news in silence, avid for its images. She knows not to repeat in front of her parents words she has heard on television, including “traque,” “terroriste,” and “tués.” The rule’s violation therefore does more than expose the children to a screen: it brings frightening public language into their private world, where Mila must quietly manage what she has seen and heard.

Louise does not turn around as the children play. Mila pushes Adam against a wall; he roars and leaps at her. The siblings’ quarrel unfolds behind the caregiver’s fixed attention to the screen. When they beg to go outside—to the square, to play with their friends, or to buy a chocolate waffle at the top of the street—Louise refuses. She will not risk meeting the other women or the elderly neighbor before whom she had humiliated herself by offering her services. Her refusal confines the children to the apartment as well as leaving them with the television.

From Care to Withdrawal

The breach is part of a wider change in Louise’s response to the children. Her stories have lost their imaginative force; Mila asks her to find something else, and Louise cannot. She puts less energy into games and laughs less, although she still watches the children closely and cherishes Adam’s habit of turning to her to share his progress. That remaining attachment sits uneasily beside the day when she leaves the television on and ignores the children’s pleas to go out.

Their repeated questions, demands for stories, and noisy games now exhaust her. Louise feels irritated by their cries and desires, and sometimes has the impulse to put her fingers around Adam’s neck and shake him until he faints; she pushes the thought away, but the narrative describes a dark, engulfing mood taking hold of her. The contrast between her earlier role as a tireless provider and her later immobility before the screen makes the violated rule an outward sign of emotional depletion, not an isolated lapse.

The Rule in the Shadow of the Murder

In the police reconstruction of the day of the murder, ordinary caregiving gestures acquire a grim afterlife. The account places Louise’s departure from the apartment, her trip to a supermarket, and her return within the sequence investigators attempt to establish; the children are energetic in the shop, while Louise remains calm and does not call after them. At four o’clock, the reconstruction turns to the bathroom: Nina Dorval is to repeat the familiar gesture of testing bathwater with her hand and call the children to come bathe. This return to a routine of care sharpens the contrast with Louise’s earlier refusal to take the children outside and her indifference before the television. The prohibition itself does not explain the crime, but its breach belongs to the visible unraveling of care that precedes the final ordinary ritual.