“When I said that last year the whole family laughed . . . Now I see you were right. As usual. It bugs me sometimes how you girls know what’s going on inside me better than I do myself . . .”

“You don’t see because you don’t look hard enough.”

“Mélène, please, no sermon.”

She laid her spoon on her plate after deliberately licking it clean, perhaps to irritate me.

“That’s exactly why you’re here, Jean-Marc, for my ­sermons! So stop complaining.”

Of course she was right. Like all the members of our little chosen family, I often came and consulted Mélène, to hear things I already knew but didn’t want to admit, in a ­reproving tone that was a lot like the kind of Judeo-Christian sermons we’d all resisted during our adolescence, whose injustices and dangers we all condemned aloud. We’d delegated Mélène to play the role of mom that we’d refused our own mothers and now we had to accept the ­consequences. I won’t let a contradiction get in my way.

“You’re in deeper than I thought, Jean-Marc . . .”

“I’m in deeper than I intended, if you want to know. You’ll tell me what you think when you meet him, but there’s something about this guy . . . something genuine, to use an unfashionable word I always used to sneer at. It’s touching, and it’s very appealing. He can seem like a little kid, and it’s true he can be very childish, but then suddenly he’ll come out with something amazing . . . When I think of what he’s been through, at his age, I feel as if he’s lived more than I have! And you get the sense that there’s a wound, a scar somewhere that he wants to hide and I want to ­discover . . .”

“You make him sound like the eighth wonder of the world . . . Watch out, Jean-Marc . . .”

“He may not be a wonder, but at least he’s alive! You meet so many walking corpses in my circles, when you find a spark of life it’s almost shocking!”

Mélène smiled, shaking her head. I’d made this speech dozens of times before, sometimes when I was on the brink of despair at ever finding anybody appropriate as my ­peregrinations became more and more rocky, more and more hysterical, sometimes marked by a bitterness she was quick to point out, because we’d long ago decreed that ­bitterness is one of the worst feelings you can experience.

“Anyway, let us know if we’ll be celebrating for a change or consoling you as usual.”