Myriam Massé

Myriam Massé is a lawyer and mother whose attempt to reconcile professional ambition with family life is made possible by Louise’s expanding labor in the home. She can identify the discrimination and dependence built into the arrangement, but she does not consistently act on that insight: Louise becomes indispensable to the household even as Myriam’s confidence in their intimacy prevents her from seeing how precarious it is. The children’s murder makes that failure of recognition inseparable from the ordinary routines through which Myriam had entrusted Louise with her family.

Identity and the Decision to Hire

Myriam returns to legal work while raising Mila and Adam with her husband, Paul Massé. The search for a nanny is organized as a practical hiring exercise: Paul prepares questions, schedules thirty-minute interviews, and reserves a Saturday afternoon for the task. His criteria exclude undocumented applicants and women who are too old, veiled, or smokers; he wants someone lively and available, so that she can work and the parents can work. The language reduces childcare to a condition of the couple’s professional activity, while placing the risks and restrictions on the person they employ.

Myriam is unsettled by the advice of her friend Emma, who warns that a nanny with children of her own may be unavailable for late hours and babysitting, and suggests that those children should remain in their home country. Myriam recognizes the discrimination in this logic: if an employer spoke about her or her friends that way, they would protest. Yet she does not raise the issue with Paul. She understands him as a pragmatist who puts family and career first, and the silence lets the hiring proceed on terms she privately dislikes.

Before the interviews, the family tidies its cramped apartment and tries to present itself as respectable, serious, and capable of giving the children the best. Paul stacks Mila’s toys after she refuses to put them away; the couple folds clothes, changes bedsheets, gathers books and magazines, and tries to air out the rooms. Their preparations expose the class relation beneath the domestic welcome: they are arranging to appear as good people to the women who will come through their door, but they are also establishing themselves as employers.

Louise’s Work and Myriam’s Dependence

On Louise’s first day, Myriam explains how the appliances work and points out possessions that matter to her, including Paul’s vinyl collection, which the children must not touch. Louise listens quietly and attentively. In the weeks that follow, she remakes the apartment: she repairs buttons, hems skirts and trousers, mends Mila’s clothes that Myriam had planned to discard, washes tobacco-yellowed curtains, and changes the bedsheets weekly. Dinner is ready when Myriam returns; the children are calm and dressed, and Mila even learns to hang up her coat. The apartment that had felt cramped and disorderly becomes, through Louise’s work, a polished domestic space.

Myriam and Paul are astonished by the transformation. Paul compares Louise to Mary Poppins, and the couple privately celebrates the new life her labor has made possible. Although the salary weighs on their household budget, Paul no longer complains: within weeks, Louise has become indispensable. For Myriam, the change answers a wish she is ashamed to admit—the fantasy of an ideal family whose daily life is orderly, calm, and smoothly cared for.

That dependence grows through small acts that exceed the initial instructions. One evening Myriam returns late while Louise is bathing the children. After the children leave the bath, Louise continues cleaning, folds towels, empties the washing machine, prepares the beds, and begins cooking. Myriam tries to take a saucepan from her, but Louise holds on and gently sends her to rest, saying that she will prepare dinner and that Myriam will hardly notice her. The scene makes care feel generous, but it also shows how readily Myriam’s responsibilities are transferred to the employee.

As the weeks pass, Louise becomes both invisible and indispensable. Myriam stops calling to explain that she will be late; Mila stops asking when her mother will come home. Louise is likened to a stagehand moving scenery in the dark, the unseen support that allows the family’s apparent ease to take shape. Myriam accepts being cared for in turn, and each day leaves more tasks to Louise. The household’s comfort rests on labor that Myriam benefits from but scarcely sees.

Louise arrives earlier and leaves later, and sometimes sleeps on the sofa after Myriam and Paul return from an evening out. They do not clearly discuss how she has begun to make a home within their apartment. Paul worries that she may one day accuse them of exploiting her; Myriam promises to restore limits, yet admits to herself that she is secretly pleased by the unrequested housework. When she apologizes for imposing, Louise answers that she is there for that purpose. Myriam also gives her inexpensive earrings, an orange cake, and clothes she no longer wears. Concerned about hurting Louise or stirring jealousy, she hides new purchases in an old cloth bag until Louise has left. Such gestures express tenderness, but they also leave the practical imbalance of work and time largely untouched.

Care, Attachment, and the Limits of Trust

Myriam does not know what Louise’s favorite game with the children reveals. Louise plays at being a police officer and a thief with Mila, devising settings, costumes, and intricate scenarios. But she also plays hide-and-seek without ordinary rules: she disappears without warning, chooses hiding places from which she can watch, and stays concealed while the children search. Myriam sees the games as evidence that Louise takes the children seriously and may herself be childlike. She does not see the moment when play becomes a test of their fear.

Louise remains hidden as Mila and Adam call for her, cry, and become distressed. Adam sobs in confusion; Mila imagines that the nanny has really left them alone in the apartment and will not return. Even when Mila begs her to stop, Louise waits in the dark and watches. Later Mila learns to search more systematically, lifting curtains and looking under the bed, but Louise finds new hiding places. Myriam’s absence from this knowledge is significant: she relies on the closeness between nanny and children without knowing what that closeness contains.

A separate incident at the park exposes the same unstable boundary between protection and possession. After Mila has moved away, Louise gathers her into her arms and covers her with kisses. Then Louise tightens her hold until Mila says that she cannot breathe. In a calm, cold voice, Louise warns that if Mila wanders off again, a bad man might take her away and keep her so that she never sees her parents again. Mila bites Louise’s shoulder until it bleeds. Neither tells Myriam what happened. Their silence makes them seem bound by a shared secret, but it also leaves Myriam unable to know how care has tipped into threat and physical struggle.

When Louise once fails to answer a call because she is ill in bed, Myriam first imagines that she may have disappeared without warning. She panics, blames herself and Paul for humiliating Louise, and fears that they have treated her as no more than an employee. Paul suggests that Louise may simply have had a problem and urges Myriam to look at the address on her contract. When Louise eventually calls to apologize and says she was too sick to get out of bed, Myriam is surprised by the ordinary explanation. She realizes that she has treated Louise as if she were invulnerable, as though her body could not become tired or ill. The episode briefly makes visible what dependence has obscured: Louise is not a limitless support system, but a person with needs the household has not reliably attended to.

Distance, Work, and Recognition

The strain in the relationship becomes harder for Myriam to avoid when Louise’s debts surface. While waiting during a court hearing, Myriam remembers repeatedly asking Louise to bring the tax-office letters and hearing that she had forgotten. She had also asked about Jacques and whether Stéphanie knew of the long-running debts, but Louise met her questions with silence. Myriam interpreted that silence as modesty and a wish to preserve the boundary between their worlds, then stopped trying to help. Now she wonders whether her discretion was also indifference: she had not examined the documents closely or kept them, and can see Louise’s increasingly pale, diminished appearance without knowing how to intervene.

Myriam’s own professional confidence throws that helplessness into relief. She is preparing to defend a man before the assize court, a setting she had dreamed of since adolescence and pursued even as a student. In her kitchen, facing Louise, she finds her throat constricted, despite her reputation for tenacity and the courage her colleague Pascal praises. The contrast does not make Myriam’s legal work insincere; it shows how little the skills she brings to court help her address the private dependency taking shape in her home.

Paul eventually agrees that they cannot keep Louise under the existing circumstances, but proposes waiting until after the summer holiday to make her understand that they no longer need her. Myriam’s response to Louise changes before any clear resolution is reached. Following Paul’s reminder that Louise is their employee, not their friend, she gives precise instructions and speaks to her only at a distance. Their tea together ends; so do the affectionate compliments and shared Friday-evening wine. Instead, they avoid being in the same room, moving through the apartment in a practiced choreography of evasion. Myriam’s earlier gifts and apologies have not prevented the relationship from reverting to its employment structure once it becomes uncomfortable.

The Murder and Myriam’s New Understanding

After the children are killed, the routines Myriam had trusted become part of the investigation. Nina Dorval reconstructs the afternoon: at four o’clock Rose Grinberg had shut the shutters, Wafa had gone to sit on a bench in the square, and Louise had headed for the bathroom. The investigators ask Paul whether Adam and Mila liked bathing and whether a bath at that hour might have surprised them. The ordinary care Myriam had depended upon—running water, checking its temperature, calling children to wash—now has to be examined as part of the crime.

The murder weapon is a small, extremely sharp ceramic kitchen knife that Louise could partly conceal in her palm. Paul identifies it as a gift from Thomas, brought from Japan. Myriam had given Thomas one euro in exchange, to ward off bad luck, and put the knife high in a cupboard because she wanted to keep it away from the children. A domestic object, stored for their protection, is disclosed as the weapon used against them.

The investigation also recasts the apparent ease of Louise’s childcare. In supermarket footage, Adam and Mila run ahead, knock packages down, and reach for chocolate eggs while Louise walks calmly through the aisles. She does not call them or keep her eyes on them; the children eventually return laughing and crowd around her, while she shows only slight irritation. The images do not explain the murder, but, alongside the investigators’ reconstruction of the bath, they unsettle the image of the flawlessly attentive caregiver that Myriam had helped to sustain.

Later, returning by car with Paul, Myriam wakes amid horns and an unfamiliar traffic jam. She looks across the road and recognizes Louise’s familiar figure on the opposite pavement. Paul is absorbed in trying to understand the gridlock and find a way through, so Myriam points again and insists that she thinks it is Louise. The sight offers no reconciliation or explanation. It is simply the former caregiver, encountered at a distance in the city, while the family’s journey home is stalled.

Myriam’s arc is not a simple movement from trust to suspicion. She has understood the inequity in the hiring logic, felt tenderness toward Louise, and benefited from her extraordinary labor; she has also left the employer’s power and the nanny’s expanding hours largely intact. The murder forces the gap between intimate familiarity and actual knowledge into view. The woman who had made Myriam’s family life appear effortless was neither merely a magical helper nor someone Myriam truly understood, and the routines that once promised safety cannot be separated from the violence that has destroyed the household.