We sat at the table and there was a silence. Presumably they were all waiting for me to speak, to start asking questions. In the end I introduced myself in a few words before mumbling something about how I was mainly there so I could listen to them. But nobody wanted to speak.

Valérie, clearly embarrassed by her family’s attitude, tried to undercut the tension: ‘It’s an intimidating situation, isn’t it?’

I made a sort of reassuring hand gesture in an attempt to make them understand that I was not in a rush. I completely understood that it would take them a while to get used to the idea, and that perhaps I would have to win their trust before they felt comfortable telling me anything.

My attention turned to Patrick. He had the manner of a sensitive child who’d retreated inside a shell of toughness. He looked slightly older than Valérie, although they were actually born the same year. They had met at university. They’d instinctively been drawn to each other, but it certainly wasn’t love at first sight. Without wishing to minimise their feelings, it seemed to me that this was what could be called a sensible kind of love. It had been Patrick’s first major relationship. Before Valérie, he’d generally been rejected by girls. He’d had a difficult adolescence, apparently, although I would never find out more than that; whenever we talked after this, he would avoid discussing that complex period. All the same, I definitely sensed that the core of his personality – his lack of self-confidence – had been formed back then, between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, when he felt as if he was on the sidelines watching all his peers fall in and out of love. Sometimes all it takes is a few failures and you can become permanently immune to success.

Coerced by his wife’s meaningful looks, Patrick was forced to start speaking. Instead of talking about his childhood or some other memory, he preferred to tell me about his day. He had worked for the past seventeen years at an insurance company. I tried to imagine what it must be like to live such a linear life, to go every day to the same place, see the same people, have the same conversations in front of the coffee machines (where you could also get soup). There must, I thought, be something reassuring about a career like that. In fact, Patrick’s professional life was going through a difficult patch. A few months before, a new manager had taken over the company. Jean-Paul Desjoyaux was the caricature of a profit-obsessed mercenary. His goal was to check everything, all the time. To be more precise, he hunted down the smallest mistakes and used them as excuses to fire people without compensation. He also didn’t hesitate to encourage his employees to denounce one another.

That morning, Desjoyaux had summoned Patrick to his office and told him that they would have a meeting in three days’ time. This was torture. Why not just tell him there and then whatever he wanted to say? Patrick would spend the next few days with his stomach in knots. Desjoyaux’s smooth, blank expression had given nothing away. It was psychological bullying honed to a fine art: a cold, almost cheerful method of professional termination. There had to be an element of sadism in his behaviour; given the general atmosphere at the company, he couldn’t not be aware that telling an employee he would see him three days later meant that the employee was going to suffer in the meantime. Worse, he had added that it was imperative that they meet. Words have a meaning. Imperative meant this was major, decisive; it sounded like a death knell.