Dressed in a white coat, she was the perfect shopkeeper. He kept on his overalls to serve. Unlike the other women, she didn’t say, ‘My husband will have a fit if I buy this, or if I go there.’ She was constantly at war with him to go to church, which he’d stopped attending while conscripted, and to give up his bad manners (which meant behaving like a labourer or a factory worker). He left her in charge of the deliveries and the accounts. She was the sort of woman who could go everywhere, in other words, she could ‘transcend the class barriers’. He admired her, although he teased her whenever she announced, ‘I’ve broken wind.’

He got a job with the Standard Oil refinery, in the 32Seine estuary. He did the night shift. He had trouble sleeping during the day because of the customers. His face became puffy and the smell of oil clung to his body: it was inside him and it became his only nourishment. He stopped eating. He was earning a high salary and prospects were good. The workers were promised a magnificent housing estate with indoor bathrooms and lavatories, a garden too.

In the autumn, fog lingered in the Valley all day. During heavy rainstorms the river flooded the house. To get rid of the water rats, he bought a short-haired bitch who broke their spines with a single snap of her jaws.

‘There were others worse off.’

The year 1936 was to be remembered as a dream. Although he was astonished at what the new political order had achieved, he had the sad conviction that the situation wouldn’t last.

The business never closed. He spent his paid holidays behind the counter. The family turned up and were duly pampered. They were only too happy to display such abundant provisions to the railwayman or boilermaker brother-in-law. Behind their backs, they were referred to as the rich, the worst possible insult.

He didn’t drink. He wanted to maintain his status. To look more like a shopkeeper than a worker. In the oil refinery, he was made foreman.33

I am writing slowly. By choosing to expose the web of his life through a number of selected facts and details, I feel that I am gradually moving away from the figure of my father. The skeleton of the book takes over and ideas seem to develop of their own accord. If on the other hand I indulge in personal reminiscences, I remember him as he was, with his way of laughing and walking, taking me by the hand to the funfair to see the huge, frightening merry-go-rounds, and I forget about everything that ties him to his own social class. Each time I face this dilemma, I have to tear myself from the subjective point of view.

Naturally, I experience no joy in writing this book, an undertaking in which I must remain close to the words and sentences I have heard. Occasionally I have resorted to italics. Not because I wish to point out a double meaning to the reader and so draw them into my confidence, something I have always rejected, whether by means of irony, pathos or nostalgia. But simply because these particular words and sentences define the nature and the limits of the world where my father lived and which I too shared. It was a world in which language was the very expression of reality.