They laughed, something they hadn’t done since . . . Mathieu tried to recall the last time he’d laughed with his former wife. What came back to him were pillow fights and giggling under the blankets, but that had been in the earliest days of their marriage; he remembered one snowy Sunday afternoon when they’d started tickling each other until things nearly got out of hand, because Mathieu didn’t know when to stop and Louise didn’t want it to go any ­further, but that wasn’t it either; then a tiny detail came back to him and a wave of emotion rose to his head: he saw himself, with Louise, leaning over Sébastien’s cradle; he saw how rapturously they had gazed at their son’s beauty as he slept so confidently, despite the little spasms that shook him from time to time, his body still too small for his head, his little bottom which he kept trying with great thrusts of his legs to lift as he lay on his stomach . . . then his first fart, loud, clear, unequivocal, emitted by a human being still unspoiled by society’s hypocrisy, able to let himself go right under his parents’ nose with a touching lack of constraint. Their eyes had filled with tears from laughing so hard, they’d taken off the child’s diaper and religiously kissed his buttocks, which awakened him and made him howl with fury.

Louise had seen the emotion on Mathieu’s face and she let him muse without interrupting him, as she’d had to learn to do when they first met. He was staring into space, holding his soup spoon midway between plate and mouth. She wanted to kiss him. They had never made an official declaration of peace; perhaps this was the time, now that he seemed to be doing all right. At last.

But Mathieu’s dream was over. He went on eating his soup as if nothing had happened.

“Want anything else? There’s some leftover veal in the fridge.”

“No thanks. That was good.”

Silence fell between them as it did every time they had something delicate to say to one another. Louise, amused, let him drift for a few moments, especially since Mathieu was the one with something to tell—she’d sensed it the minute he came inside—then she leaned across to him, the eternal adolescent, so handsome and touching, whom she’d loved so much it had nearly driven her mad, and hated so much it had nearly made her sick.

“I haven’t seen you in such a good mood for ages . . . You were so miserable for so long! I can’t wait to meet the great man who’s actually been able to make you smile!”

“Oh you’ll meet him—both of you . . . How’s Gaston doing, by the way?”