Louise overturned Lidi's baby carriage

Louise overturns Lydie’s stroller after Lydie offers to give her the number of a pregnant woman looking for childcare, turning an ordinary walk home into a deliberate act of violence. The baby survives, but the episode makes visible how Louise’s consuming desire for a child has begun to transform other people—and even an infant—into obstacles to the family and future she believes she must possess.

The Square and Lydie’s Offer

At six in the evening, groups of young men arrive at the square. The nannies know what their presence means: broken pipes near the playground, urine in the planters, and the possibility of a fight. They quickly collect abandoned coats and sand-covered toy diggers, attach their handbags to the strollers, and leave. The women form a procession through the gates before dividing toward different neighborhoods.

Louise walks alongside Lydie toward the Grands Boulevards, holding Mila and Adam by the hand. When the pavement narrows, she lets Lydie go ahead, bent over the stroller carrying a sleeping baby. Their walk places Louise among the nannies and children of the square, but it also exposes how precarious her place in that community has become.

Lydie tells her that a young pregnant woman came by the previous day and is expecting twins in August. She explains that the woman lives on Rue des Martyrs, is due at the end of August, and is looking for someone to care for the children. The mothers who come to the square to find nannies are described as watching the women and the children they tend, sometimes asking questions and making inquiries. Lydie’s recommendation offers Louise a possible job, but it arrives in the same moment as an image of a coming baby.

A Refusal That Becomes an Attack

Louise looks at Lydie as though hearing her from far away. Lydie’s voice seems to echo inside her head, but its words do not separate into meaning. Louise bends to pick up Adam and catches Mila under the arm. Lydie raises her voice and asks whether she should give the pregnant woman Louise’s number.

Louise does not answer. Instead, she gathers momentum and moves forward abruptly, cutting across Lydie’s path. As she flees, she makes a sharp movement that overturns the stroller. The baby, startled awake, begins to scream. The narration and Lydie’s later account establish the act as intentional, not an accidental collision.

Lydie cries out as her shopping spills into the gutter. Louise is already far away. People gather around Lydie, who is identified as Ivorian; they pick mandarins from the pavement and throw away a baguette soaked in the gutter. The crowd also checks on the baby, who, fortunately, is unharmed. The scattered groceries and the crying child register the immediate damage of Louise’s flight, while the infant’s survival limits the physical consequence without undoing the deliberate danger.

Lydie’s Account and Louise’s Fixation

Lydie tells the story repeatedly, insisting that Louise did not tip the stroller by accident but did it on purpose. Her repeated testimony gives the episode a public afterlife: what Louise leaves behind as a sudden escape becomes, for Lydie, a remembered assault that must be named and affirmed.

The scene’s meaning is sharpened by the offer that precedes it. Lydie is not confronting Louise or taking a child from her; she is offering a practical connection to a woman who needs childcare. Yet the prospect of twins appears to strike Louise as something other than an employment possibility. She cannot absorb the offer as ordinary speech, and the stroller’s fall converts her unspoken response into physical action.

The larger context identifies the force driving her. Louise has come to believe that a baby she would love passionately could solve all her problems. She imagines that a child would silence the women in the square, push back her landlord, and protect her position in the household she regards as her kingdom. A possible new employer’s pregnancy therefore touches the same terrain as Louise’s own impossible longing: babies, paid care, and the place she hopes to occupy are entangled.

Desire, Possession, and Consequence

Louise persuades herself that Paul and Myriam lack time for each other and that Mila and Adam prevent them from becoming close again. She blames the children’s caprices and Adam’s light sleep for exhausting the couple and interrupting their intimacy. In this distorted account, the children’s ordinary needs become the explanation for why Paul and Myriam have not made another baby for her.

The stroller incident gives that reasoning a concrete and disturbing consequence. Louise’s imagined family future depends on a baby who would secure her belonging; when confronted with news of someone else’s impending children, she cannot respond with the practical care her work requires. Her desire is not presented as a simple wish for motherhood but as an increasingly possessive fantasy in which a child would protect her place and resolve problems that cannot be solved by a baby.

The passage carries the violence of that fantasy toward its limit: Louise wants the child so desperately that she is capable, the narration says, of suffocating, burning, or annihilating whatever stands between her and its satisfaction. The overturned stroller is not the fulfillment of that ultimate threat, and Lydie’s baby is unharmed. It is, instead, a decisive warning: Louise’s longing has already crossed from imagined possession into deliberate harm to a child who has done nothing to obstruct her.