“We’re not here to put people down, Madame. If anybody is suffering here, it’s you.”

As to that last point, she was right.

I went home, went to bed and slept for twenty hours.

Two days later, flicking through Le Parisien with my croissant and coffee at the local café, I read an article that both saddened me and filled me with relief: the previous day an inmate by the name of Afid B. had had his throat slit at Villepinte prison.

Most women spend their life trying to extricate themselves from the example set by their mother . . . There was no getting around the fact that I was doing exactly the opposite. In fact, I was going even further. I was remaking myself in the image my own mother used to hold up as her ideal: the intrepid Jewish woman.

4

The chameleon that snoozes, loses

It was the end of July. The sun was scorching the sky; Parisians were migrating to the beaches. And just as I was getting started in my new career, Philippe, my cop fiancé, took up his position as Commander of the drug squad for the Second District DPJ.

“We’ll see each other more this way,” he’d said cheerfully, when he’d announced the news two months earlier, on the day of his appointment.

I was genuinely happy for him — but back then, I was only a simple court translator-interpreter and I didn’t yet have 1.2 tonnes of hash in my basement.

Philippe.

So, he’s a man. Broad-backed, muscly, carrying a bit of extra weight, big, beautiful hands. A kind face with a thick head of hair, a rare thing at fifty-eight. The sort of guy everyone wants to please, who can be measured by his generosity, by the number of friends he has, or the number of godchildren — by everything, really . . . A guy whose social standing was plain for all to see at significant occasions such as birthdays or leaving drinks. A guy whose funeral would mean a graveyard crowded with mourners.

Physically, I couldn’t say whether he was my type. In any event, he looked nothing like the only man who had ever really meant anything to me, namely, my husband, whom people always assumed was my big brother, we looked so alike. In fact, prior to Philippe, I hadn’t ever really experienced physical otherness. I’m not saying I’d lived like a nun for twenty years, but my sex life had been limited to one-night stands, always with criminal lawyers, by definition a bunch of lying, unfaithful, narcissistic womanizers . . . And this was when I still belonged to the MILF category — mother I’d like to fuck. Once I hit forty, it was all over.

It was Philippe’s desire for me that really won out; a desire that was strong and genuine, that shone in his eyes when he looked at me, and that would have carried away any menopausal creature . . .