I thought she would want to know more about him. It wouldn’t have been difficult to dig a little deeper. But what she’d just seen appeared to have stolen all her energy. She said she wanted to rest now, and I understood perfectly. As she walked me to the door, she said: ‘Thank you.’ I hadn’t done anything special – just typed a name into my phone. At the last moment, she held me back. ‘I know I’m old and tired,’ she said, ‘and that sometimes I get a bit mixed up, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: I want to see Yves again. I want to see him again before I die.’

24

After leaving the apartment, I went downstairs, walking more and more slowly until finally I sat down on a step. I had been staggered by Madeleine’s last words: ‘Before I die.’ As soon as she saw that man’s photograph, she immediately decided she had one final act to accomplish. My questions had, unwittingly, triggered an unstoppable desire. And of course – why deny it? – I thought about my book. Perhaps this, and this alone, was my story? I already saw myself flying to the United States with Madeleine to describe the joy of their reunion.

This story reminded me of a newspaper article I’d read recently, with photographs that had been published all over the world, touching the hearts of everyone who saw them. Seventy-five years after the Normandy Landings, an American man had rediscovered the woman he’d loved. Stunned by this miracle of fate, the two of them had held hands, their eyes full of tears. The passing of time changes everything – except love. It was impossible to believe otherwise after seeing those pictures.

As I drifted into sentimentality, however, I was stopped in my tracks by a question. The same one that had come to mind after my meeting with Valérie. There was a strange parallel between the two encounters. As if both women had been trying to produce a form of narrative tension. In Valérie’s case, there was no doubt about it. At the very last moment of our meeting, turning back to me to announce that she was going to leave her husband, she had clearly been attempting to create suspense. Just as every episode of a television series ends with an event that leaves the viewer eager to find out what happens next. A cliffhanger. As if writing the script of her own life, Valérie had deliberately left me with that hunger to know more. And would leave the reader in the same state, if I ever managed to write this story.

Now Madeleine was doing something similar. Not that I believed she was acting deliberately like a narrator. I found it hard to imagine her having a conscious grasp of the concept of a cliffhanger. And yet, that last scene had combined all the necessary ingredients. What was going to happen next? She wanted to see Yves again. It seemed obvious to me that I would play a role in the organisation of this reunion. Once again, it was my presence that had sparked this unexpected development in her life. I was like a psychiatrist met by chance. You speak to him without any sense that you have issues to share, yet within three minutes you have started unburdening yourself to him. In this case, though, what lay deep within Madeleine’s heart was not an issue but a sort of buried treasure. While she had inevitably been knocked sideways by seeing Yves’s photograph, the overpowering emotion that I had sensed in her after she had revealed her secret to me was happiness. She had never really talked to her daughters about the intensity of that first love, out of respect for their father. My book would give her the chance to tell her story at last.