In the StoryThe Absent Woman’s Photograph
In the 1912 portrait, someone has disappeared beneath the scissors. In Camille Vallet’s family, the frame has always been there. They knew the faces, the places, the story passed down with the picture. But a cut turns the portrait into a question. Then an intact photographic plate reveals a fifth woman: the one the family had stopped seeing.
Open the novel ↗A moment in the opening pages
The photograph showed four people in front of the south façade of Les Ormes. Camille knew their names because she had been taught them before she understood that family photographs needed captions. Auguste Vallet, short mustache, stomach contained by his waistcoat. Marguerite, his wife, seated beneath the climbing rose. Claire, their elder daughter, in a light-colored dress. Étienne, standing behind her, twenty-two and already wearing the stern mouth that appeared in photographs of his father, then of Jeanne, his daughter, and sometimes in the mirror…Read the excerpt ↗