Louise and Stéphanie

Louise and Stéphanie are mother and daughter, but their bond is strained by the distance between Louise’s devotion to paid childcare and her troubled efforts to raise her own child. The school’s disciplinary proceedings bring that contradiction into the open: Louise pleads for Stéphanie, is confronted with the limits of her attention, and then, after the girl is expelled, attacks her at home. Their relationship is neither a simple story of maternal sacrifice nor one of uncomplicated rejection; it is where economic pressure, shame, tenderness, and violence converge.

Family Life and Unequal Attention

Louise describes Stéphanie as nearly twenty when she interviews for work with the Massé family, presenting her daughter as grown and herself as highly available. That claim helps secure a job, but it also frames the divide that shadows their relationship: Louise can promise employers the attentiveness their children need, while Stéphanie’s own schooling and conduct become increasingly difficult to manage. The contrast is sharpened by the employers’ assumptions about childcare. Paul and Myriam weigh candidates partly by whether they have children and whether those children might limit their availability; Myriam is troubled by the discriminatory logic but avoids challenging Paul. Louise’s family circumstances enter the hiring process chiefly as evidence that she can work.

The narrative reveals more about Louise’s own childhood and history through the memories that surface while she is out with Mila and Adam. Among images of past humiliations and people who gave orders, she recalls the chalky taste of an apple pastry left at the bottom of a bag and eaten anyway. The fragment places material want and remembered authority alongside her present caregiving work, without making those memories a direct explanation for her later assault on Stéphanie. It does, however, locate their relationship in a life where care, deprivation, and humiliation recur in different forms.

Stéphanie’s School Crisis

Stéphanie’s educational opportunity comes through Mme Perrin, an employer of Louise, who arranges for her to attend a Paris school regarded as better than the one she would have attended in Bobigny. The gesture is offered as help to a hardworking, deserving employee. Within weeks of starting the school year in third year, however, Stéphanie is disrupting lessons, throwing objects, swearing at teachers, skipping classes, and smoking cannabis in a square before noon. She hides notes and warnings from Louise, and fails to answer the school’s attempts to summon her mother.

Mme Perrin calls Louise in and explains that Stéphanie will face a disciplinary hearing. She describes it as a tribunal and tells Louise that she will have to defend her daughter. The language turns an educational proceeding into a judgment of maternal competence. Louise goes to the hearing with Stéphanie, where teachers and other school representatives describe the girl as disruptive, undisciplined, and insolent. They say they have tried different approaches and can no longer manage her in the classroom; a teacher suggests she might fare better in a neighborhood closer to home, among more familiar surroundings.

Louise begs the panel to give Stéphanie another chance. In tears, she explains that she takes care of the children she looks after, disciplines them, and makes sure they do not watch television while doing homework. She insists that she has principles and experience in raising children. Her defense reveals the painful mismatch between professional and personal motherhood: she can cite the standards she applies to her employers’ children, yet the school has repeatedly been unable to reach her about her own daughter. When a teacher asks how many siblings Stéphanie has, Louise initially misunderstands and answers by speaking of the children in her care. She then clarifies that these are the children she looks after every day, and says that her employer is pleased with their upbringing.

The hearing exposes the limits of that professional identity. Louise’s expertise in childcare is not proof that she has been able to intervene in Stéphanie’s escalating problems, and the school’s decision comes despite her appeal. In March, after a winter that seems unwilling to end, she is told that Stéphanie is being expelled. An offer of help with administrative matters does not soften the outcome: Louise does not understand at first, then grasps that her daughter has been dismissed from the school.

The Assault and Its Aftermath

Outside the hearing room, Stéphanie seems not to share the seriousness Louise feels. In the corridor she laughs, jokes with classmates, and whispers to a shy girl; Louise, by contrast, is holding herself back from trembling. She wants to shake Stéphanie and make her understand the humiliation and effort involved in raising her. The narration gives force to the difference between them without suggesting that Stéphanie understands the cost Louise attributes to her behavior.

On the bus home, Louise stays silent while Stéphanie listens to music and looks out the window. As they walk up the gray street toward Jacques’s home, Stéphanie slows to look at the market stalls. Louise seizes her by the sleeve and drags her onward. Her anger intensifies; once she closes the small entrance gate behind them, she beats her daughter. She punches Stéphanie’s back, knocks her to the ground, slaps and scratches her, pulls her hair, and strikes her face as the girl curls up to protect herself. When Stéphanie stops moving, Louise spits in her face. The violence is not an abstract collapse of discipline: it follows a specific chain of pressures, from the hearing and expulsion to Louise’s anger at her daughter’s apparent indifference on the way home.

Jacques hears the commotion and watches Louise assault Stéphanie from a window, but does not try to separate them. His inaction leaves the mother and daughter alone with the immediate consequences of the beating. The episode establishes a brutal fracture in their relationship: Louise’s desperation to make Stéphanie feel the cost of her efforts becomes physical harm, while Stéphanie’s apparent composure has offered no route to reconciliation or understanding.

Relationship in the Wider Story

Louise’s relationship with Stéphanie is set against a world in which women’s caregiving is judged and traded across unequal positions. At the Massé family’s hiring interviews, Paul lays out preferences that exclude undocumented applicants and favor a nanny who is available to work so the parents can work. Myriam recognizes the discrimination involved in treating a candidate’s children as a reason to reject her, but avoids raising the issue with Paul. Louise’s own motherhood is thus entangled with an employment arrangement that rewards her availability to another family.

The contrast extends beyond one household. In the square where nannies meet, employers’ children often wear similar clothes with their names written on the labels, while the women who care for them remain largely unknown to the families. Nannies exchange work leads and complaints there, using the public space as an informal hiring office and place to raise workplace grievances. Against this collective picture of care work, Louise’s case is particularly stark: she is praised by employers for looking after their children, while the proceedings over Stéphanie reveal how little that praise can tell outsiders about her own family life.

The relationship also remains present in Louise’s recollections and in the book’s portrayal of her as a mother. Stéphanie’s laugh returns among the disjointed memories that crowd Louise’s mind, alongside the remembered pastry and voices of people who ordered or advised her. The image is not a resolution of the conflict; it is a sign that her daughter remains part of Louise’s inner life even when their relationship is shaped by estrangement and harm. The school hearing and the assault make visible the central contradiction between being recognized as a competent caregiver for other people’s children and being judged, and judging herself, as a mother to her own.