Mathieu had a very clear recollection of his mother’s mania for warming feet. She’d done it to him so often when he was a child, on this same sofa, while they watched Les Beaux Dimanches on Sunday night or those TV serials that “started too late.” He would lie beside her, under the same sort of quilt, maybe this very one, which had come to them from her mother, a great Gaspesian artist who had salvaged every rag in the county in order to produce the star-­patterned pieces that had made her reputation, under which you felt so secure; he would pretend to fall asleep during “Septième Nord” or “De neuf à cinq” and arrange himself so he could extend his foot towards her . . .

That thumb on the soles of his feet, that gentleness, all the tenderness concentrated on such a tiny surface . . . The soles of his feet tingled. He wished that he could become again the child who had once been so easily consoled, that he could lie down next to Sébastien and sleep, knowing that a light, beneficent hand would imprint upon one of the most sensitive spots on his body—he was very ticklish—a ­magical, soothing sign of her complicity.

He had wounded his mother deeply and he knew it, but he was the one who wanted consolation!

Rose let go of Sébastien’s little foot and blew her nose. Mathieu didn’t feel like pursuing the conversation, but it had to be brought to an end: you don’t leave such an ­important scene unresolved, you have to see it all the way through or not provoke it at all. (He’d already put it off for so many years!)

“Don’t tell me you didn’t suspect something, Mamma . . .”

Silence. She seemed to be in the grip of emotions so “ powerful she couldn’t speak.

“Mamma . . . you knew . . . and you’ve known for ages!”

Rose looked at him directly for the first time in half an hour. Throughout his confession she had watched Sébastien sleep, or nervously twisted the hem of her skirt, while she examined the flowers in the carpet.

“You were married . . . you had a child . . .”

“I explained all that . . . I don’t want to go over it again . . .”

“I know, I know, I’m not stupid! You don’t have to tell me again, it was painful enough the first time!”

She took Sébastien’s foot again, but a little too roughly; the child stirred and moaned in his sleep.

“What’s he going to say when he’s old enough to understand?”

“We’re talking about you now, not him. I’ll take care of Sébastien. I’m going to bring him up so things like that aren’t important . . . What I want to know is how you feel?”