Adam Djourescu and Hélène Djourescu’s marriage

Adam Djourescu and Hélène Djourescu’s marriage is shadowed by a wartime family story in which Adam’s wife Elena, a newborn child, and the deportation of neighboring families become entangled. Decades later, that story is invoked to justify a violent revenge plot; its crucial contradiction is that the baby said to have died was not Elena’s, and the son Adam carried away from the soldiers was alive.

The Wartime Family Story

Madame Laseige recalls that the apartments were all on the top floor. She was not especially close to either family, but, as a young mother, she helped when Louise Florian gave birth. Louise’s pregnancy had not been difficult, yet something went wrong near its end: the baby arrived early and was stillborn. Only hours later, Elena gave birth to a healthy boy. Madame Laseige was not present at Elena’s delivery.

That distinction matters because the report Yvonne Flaco had read assigned the premature death to Elena’s baby. Madame Laseige’s recollection instead places the stillbirth in Louise’s apartment and Elena’s healthy newborn in the Djourescu household. The two births, close together in time and within the same building, provide the circumstances for the later confusion over which child was which.

Adam and the Newborns

Madame Laseige remembers vehicles braking in the street, doors slamming, and soldiers entering the building. Their advance up the stairs seemed directed: they knew where they were going. As the soldiers approached the top floor, Adam ran past her toward Louise and Marcel’s apartment carrying his newborn son, described as a living, squirming bundle.

Adam then ran back toward his own apartment, still carrying a bundle. This time, Madame Laseige emphasizes, it was not moving. The narrative places the two journeys side by side, leaving a stark contrast between the living child Adam first carried and the lifeless bundle he carried back. The scene does not explicitly explain his actions, but its sequence supplies the emotional and factual basis for the later claim that the babies’ identities were switched.

Deportation and Inherited Grievance

After the soldiers entered the building, they took the families away to the trains. Madame Laseige says she never saw the Djourescus again. Her account turns an intimate household history into part of the wider story of deportation, while its uncertainty about the infants becomes something that can be transmitted across generations as remembered fact.

Decades later, Corinne Delage tells Agnès and Vincent Dantier that Elena was Adam’s beloved wife and that Vincent’s father had tried to seduce her, only to be laughed at. Delage connects this alleged humiliation and the family history to Adam’s descendants, identifying Vincent as Adam’s grandson. Agnès, terrified and struggling to make sense of her captivity, rejects the story as ludicrous and asks whether Vincent has staged the ordeal because he believed a lie from nearly seventy years earlier.

Distortion and Consequence

Delage’s account is not a neutral confirmation of the wartime events. She uses it while Agnès and Vincent are captive, and later invokes the deportation of her grandparents and aunt to Auschwitz in October 1943, describing forced labor, gassing, and the disposal and burning of bodies. That history gives her grievance its terrible weight, but it does not resolve the contradiction between her asserted family narrative and Madame Laseige’s recollection of the births.

The marriage therefore matters less as a developed portrait of domestic life than as the center of a contested inheritance. Elena is remembered as Adam’s cherished wife; the newborns’ closely timed births and Adam’s movement between apartments become the hinge on which a later family accusation turns. The disparity between an eyewitness’s account and the revenge plot built upon a decades-old story makes the marriage part of the novel’s examination of how trauma can be preserved, misremembered, and used to rationalize violence.