My mother wore a slightly scornful smile when she described the man who made that fatuous claim, my great-grandfather, my grandmother Antoinette’s father.

“Quite a handsome man,” she would say. “But vain and weak.”

When I had studied the photographs heaped up in a drawer of my grandmother’s desk, my own verdict was that he was old and lacked judgment. It is true that he had a finely shaped nose, big light eyes, ample cheeks and just enough of a jaw…Yes, one could say, despite his frightened expression and the incompleteness of his face, that he was handsome…Indeed, as are nearly all those gentlemen with brown or prematurely grey hair under their képis or bowler hats: my great-grandfather, grandfather and uncles, all of them dead before I was born…On the other hand, my mother apart, the women of the family were not beautiful.

“It’s the women who run things among us” was another of his sallies.

By the time my mother got to know him, he had already suffered two heart attacks and was rolling at a good clip toward an elusive death: in the wheelchair that my grandmother pushed indefatigably, and she, yes, had certainly run their lives.

My grandmother Antoinette must have been the exception that proved the rule…She lived quite alone and apart from all adult hurly-burly; she gave of her time and her energy to amuse us. Her nose was somewhat large and bent, and I never saw eyes, short of shade from her lashes, with other than a dullish sea-green expression. Yet her contemporaries, those who knew her in her provincial prime, spoke of her “wonderful eyes”. Legend has it that a young man had killed himself for those wonderful eyes…As far back as I can search my memory, Grandmother was always an old lady. On the Brittany beaches where she helped me make sand-cakes and castles, the hem of her long dress was often wet from the tide. In those days fashion had brought skirts to knee-high. In the tea-shops to which she took us to stuff ourselves with ice-creams and pastries, she was one-of-a-kind. It happened that I might reach for my napkin under the little round marble table and find it alongside the tip of her tiny ankle-boot, itself half hidden under that sort of tent, her vast and only black skirt. All around us were silk-sheathed legs that were crossed and showed knees round, knees square or pointy, and some fleshy and dimpled with indentions on either flank…I could always recognize the thin legs, the drooping stockings, and the shapeless oversized shoes of the very old…but of Grandmother I saw but the slender black ankle-boot with its worn-down heel…

She wore hat and veil, both always black, and was never hatless until she had reached home. “She was a flaming redhead,” those same people say who knew her young and splendid, when men died for her.

For at least the last twenty years I’ve seen Grandmother adjusting the same wig on her brow, a sort of grey fringe yellowed with age that clashes with the silvery white of the hair at the nape of her neck…Her hats, of straw in summer and felt in winter, are of an age with that fringe which they displace. In season she might deck her straw hat with a brand-new ribbon of the Lyon silk known as gros grain; a flower in black organdy tied with a piece of jet-glass would do for the felt one. Her dresses were of the same sort: they dated from the dark ages. Antoinette was gracious enough to us to be unchangeable and therefore eternal.

“How old is Grandmother?” I asked her daughter, my mother, recently.

My still lovely young mother answered, “Hold on, let me think. Seventy, I think.”

So twenty years ago, on the beach at Croisic, she would have been fifty. Only ten years older than my mother today…

It has to be said that despite her cumbersome clothes she ran like a gazelle. Playing hide-and-seek only rarely could we escape her…She was indefatigable. After hide-and-seek came hunt-the-slipper, then “rough seas”, then croquet which she and her team always won, since she was unbeatable…It was at croquet that I discovered that her ankle-boot concealed a thin, nervy foot, tough as steel. At every opportunity she would line up her opponent’s ball and her own, hold hers down with the tip of her toes and then—quietly, as though it were nothing at all—whack! a master-stroke of the mallet against her ball and her opponent’s went right off the pitch…She played for real; she wasn’t into making life easy for us. She liked us to believe it was as much fun for her as for us; but if we should beat her, that was a real victory, a trophy we weren’t likely to forget.

When we’d get dead tired, she’d read us Perrault stories, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Croc-Blanc, The Jungle Book, whatever, always in a clear calm voice…Never even remotely breathless. Sometimes she’d tell us bits of her childhood or youth…Such adventures she must have had, how many suppressed fits of giggles; the best were saved for children sitting rigidly on their chairs, prisoners of grown-up talk! We died to hear them…Of course she’d had a privileged life…At our family table we no longer ran into a man with elephant ears in which grew such tufts of hair that one day a wasp took to nestling there…He shook his head as a horse does clouded with flies, but the underbrush had to be trimmed with the grape-scissors, right there, at table, during dessert!…Nor was there in our lives an aged single-toothed basset hound to leap from his master’s lap and attack stranger’s calves with his incisor! Antoinette had been fifteen back then, and dying of boredom at the dinner table to which her father had dragged her to replace her mother who had a cold. Someone had unthinkingly opened the door to the room where the dog had been sequestered. Between soup and roast the entire company stood on chairs while the animal growled and bared his single tooth, attacking each chair and trying to hoist his aged body up, deaf to the commands and supplications of his master. Grandmother made out that she alone knew how to address the beast and, thanks to a bit of bread dipped in the soup, had led him back to his basket…

And then there was the elderly lady ventriloquist who, very calmly from the depths of her chair on the master of the house’s right, reserved for her by her advanced years, mouth shut and face impassive, imitated the troating of the stag. The act apparently never failed for all present would rush out of doors hoping to see the beast or its antlers rising above the heather…She spoke to us of people whose names we never tired of hearing: a certain Monsieur Cuiscuisse de Lenfoutras de Kergorlax Tamore, who had taken her to the garrison ball in Poitiers, or the nut-and-bolt factory belonging to Lenus Desfesses & Co., who so proudly emblazoned his juridical status in big black letters across the street from her nursery window…Such extravagant names quite overshadowed the names of our class-mates, though she didn’t like our making fun of them. “Pansu?” she said. “Velu, Pupied? Perfectly common. Known hundreds of them in my day.” And then her gifts would overwhelm us with the sudden invention, just like that of the great scientist Cosine, the “Mnelectricupedaliwindbreakshakeparanailcycle”.

At times she would stop entertaining us, sit down in an armchair and read…These were often old books, leather-bound and worn white with use. She would often laugh all by herself, a silent laugh. At such times her face showed a sort of slightly scornful jubilation, and that we adored. “It’s so utterly stupid,” she would mumble, still reading, inviting us to bear witness: the Princess Palatine did not muffle her words, her memoirs were full of scatological detail…What could be more irresistible than to hear that from our mother’s mother?

Of course, as soon as he heard us burst into laughter, our father would interrupt indignantly: “Really, mother, such matters are not for children!”

She said nothing, pretended to shut the book and, as soon as his back was turned, returned to her reading.