Meanwhile, Mario lay down beside Catherine: the little girl had been having trouble sleeping for a while now, and her mother had asked him to keep an eye on her. It was nap time and all the children were asleep. After the morning’s hullabaloo—the noon hour agitation, the outing to the park which had been complicated by the fact that Catherine had lost a mitten and he’d had to go back through the slush to find it—Mario was very grateful for this half-hour of peace and quiet. The other two monitors had gone outside for a cigarette; today, it was his turn to take a nap with the children.

Catherine was moaning. He gently stroked the curve of her forehead with his fingertip, humming a tune she ­particularly liked. She huddled against his shoulder, sucking her thumb. Another one who needs more affection? Telling himself really, you ask too many ­questions, Mario rolled onto his back and fell asleep.

Mario’s awakening was brutal; Eric Boucher flopped onto his stomach, shouting:

“Mario, I’m hungry!”

He thought that if Eric wakened his parents like this every morning, family breakfasts must be lively.

“Eric, you could have suffocated me! That hurt!”

Eric merely scowled.

One by one, the children woke up; conversations, often incomprehensible, resumed where they’d been broken off, and games did too. Groups re-formed automatically, as if the children all possessed magnets that attracted their friends and repelled the others.

It was time to fix their snack. Mario was on his way to tell his colleagues that nap-time was over when he saw Sébastien marching over to Eric Boucher. Anticipating another brawl he was about to intervene when he heard Sébastien say:

“I got something you haven’t got!”

It was the worst insult you could offer Eric, who always wanted to be the one with the most—of everything. Accordingly he walked up to Sébastien, saying:

“You do not! I got more Transformers and I got more Schtroumpfs!”

“I don’t mean that! I’ve got a mummy and three daddies!”

Silence. All heads turned towards Sébastien. Mario hid his surprise with a nervous giggle, and then, as he got the picture, thought he’d really like to meet Sébastien’s father . . .

Meanwhile, Eric Boucher was standing stock-still in the middle of the playroom. His supporters stared at him wide-eyed, hoping he’d have some devastating reply to silence Sébastien. But nothing came; Eric couldn’t beat Sébastien’s trio of aces. He’d never been so humiliated: he began to howl. Fat tears poured down his cheeks, generous and inexhaustible, the ­genuinely sorrowful tears of an inconsolable child.

Sébastien was very proud of himself: he’d managed to make Eric Boucher cry without laying a hand on him.