Léa

Léa is The Narrator’s longtime friend and a key witness to Jade’s early life. Their relationship gives The Narrator both a personal connection and a route into the history she is trying to understand: Léa knew Jade when they were young, and her memories describe the gap between Jade’s confident first impression and her later vulnerability. In their conversations, Léa also speaks about her own pregnancy and the doubts it brought to the surface.

Friendship with The Narrator

Léa and The Narrator have known each other for eleven years, though they lived together for only one year, at the beginning of their friendship. They maintained contact despite living apart, adapting as communication changed: first email, then Facebook, and, in the final weeks of The Narrator’s pregnancy, Telegram at Léa’s suggestion. Their connection is therefore not simply a surviving college friendship; it is a relationship repeatedly kept active across distance and changing circumstances.

After returning home with Erik, The Narrator writes to Léa as soon as she has a free hand and sends a photograph of the newborn. She does not include the baby’s height or weight, details she notes that other mothers sometimes share. The modest exchange shows how their friendship continues into a new phase of The Narrator’s life. Later, when she wants to move forward with her project, she decides that she needs to see Léa because her friend is one of the people who knew Jade best.

Meeting Jade and the change of roles

Léa first arrives with Jade, a French friend who is to help her settle in during the first days. Jade has substantial luggage, and a porter is apparently needed; the account identifies the porter as Jade. At the time, The Narrator is new to the campus, the city, and the country, and is trying to find friends who will remain for the course. She initially gives little attention to the two French women, especially after deciding that one of them is only passing through. Jade’s striking appearance catches her eye, but Jade seems unfriendly, and her limited English makes conversation difficult.

Léa later recalls that the women’s positions were not what their first impressions had suggested. Before arriving, Jade had seemed worldly, while Léa saw herself as inexperienced and still closely tied to her parents’ home. On campus, however, Jade was outside her element. She had little English, feared that people would address her, and stayed close behind Léa. The reversal exposed a vulnerability that Jade found painful. Léa thinks that Jade’s distress may have come either from recognizing her own dependence or from realizing that Léa had noticed it. Afterward, Jade stopped speaking to her. The friendship between the two women thus appears to have changed not through a single fully explained dispute, but after a moment in which their apparent roles and Léa’s view of Jade shifted.

Léa as a witness to Jade’s past

When The Narrator arranges to meet Léa, she does so with a specific purpose: she believes a conversation with someone who knew the young Jade well could help her project progress. Léa initially has to bring them back to the reason for the meeting. Over a meal of oysters, she recalls that Jade had taught her to put her fingers in her throat, then gives The Narrator a compressed account of both women’s childhoods and adolescence. The episode is recalled as part of a larger personal history, not elaborated into a full explanation of its circumstances or consequences.

Léa’s value to The Narrator lies in this intimate, partial knowledge. She can remember Jade from before the events The Narrator is investigating, including the contrast between Jade’s worldly image and her difficulty adjusting to the campus. But her account is also a recollection shaped by the friendship’s rupture: Léa can describe what she observed and offer a tentative explanation for why Jade withdrew, while acknowledging uncertainty about what Jade herself felt. The Narrator’s project depends on such memories, even when they do not resolve every question.

Pregnancy, adulthood, and Albert

In another conversation, Léa describes how her long-held desire to have children changed once she became pregnant. She had been preoccupied with motherhood since she was sixteen, but pregnancy brought doubts she had previously avoided. She began comparing her situation with that of friends her own age, including The Narrator, who had remained in England and was enjoying life in London. Léa saw them as having the advantages of adulthood without its disadvantages, a comparison that made her reconsider the future she had chosen.

She also reassessed her relationship with Albert. Léa says that she had chosen him exclusively for his qualities as a father, not for any other reason. Pregnancy made her feel the need for an escape and for a renewed sense of being alive; she connects that need with Fabrice. In her account, Fabrice offered a way out of the state she was in, and she says that without him she might have returned to vomiting after meals, or to something worse. The passage presents this as Léa’s own retrospective explanation, linking the pressure of pregnancy and her doubts about her choices to the search for escape, without supplying a fuller account of what followed.