Meyerbach

When I was about thirty years old, not long before I lost my mother, I had undertaken with my sister and her a visit of the places where our family originated, on her side. A farm, an uninteresting village on the side of the road... But there was also a day in this town near Paris where she took us to a large white house, rather decrepit, which reminded me of the few more or less abandoned houses belonging to the army on Avenue Joffre in my own town – a legacy of the German occupation after 1871. She explained that the house was called "Meyerbach".

It had become a kind of orphanage or home for troubled teenagers and young adults. We had an ancestor who had lived there when it was a mansion. Was he the master in question or an employee, I'll never know. The moment was quite moving; I was eager to enter this building to explore it, to discover it – whereas I had never wondered about the very existence of such a house, and would have passed by without paying the slightest attention to it if my mother had not pointed it out to us, I now felt the need to make it part of my life, to make it mine, or to make myself part of it, of its history, even of its present life, preparing, after all, to become an orphan myself, soon, and to wander through life like the young people who lived there.