She recently took it into her head that she wanted to become a psychoanalyst. The idea just came to her one morning, she said, looking out the window at Belleville, the people walking down the street, so many different kinds of people in this small neighborhood in Paris. It was as if Belleville, or the apartment itself, had inspired this desire in her. I just want to understand people, she told me. This was a shock; I had assumed she wouldn’t work. When we met, on a beach in ’67 (my god, her small tight ass with the bikini falling off!), she had recently graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in literature. What else was she going to do with that, besides be a wife and mother? But in the years after she and her friends had graduated, they became progressively more political. They turned out to be a bunch of troublemakers, going back to the university they’d graduated from – mind you, they had graduated at this point – and filling up the amphitheatres talking about freedom and Mao, which, I’m sorry, if you ask me is a bit of a contradiction in terms. Next thing you know she’s on the barricades, and throwing paving stones, and sympathising with the workers (Stalinists! I told her), reading Freud and all his children. But she was irritated with the men leading the movement, who were perfectly happy, she said, to make revolution by day and come home to a cooked dinner at night. And who cooks it? she asked. Their wives! Where is their liberation? When you were born, she likes to remind me, women couldn’t vote. Your mother couldn’t vote. My mother couldn’t vote. She came home a few months ago and informed me she’d signed up for a masters at one of the new post-’68 universities. I told her she wouldn’t be able to do that and be a mother, but she’s convinced she’ll make it work. I can take a break when the degree is over, she says, and when the baby is ready to start school I can go back and start my doctorate. She has it all figured out. But what about the second one? I ask. What second one? she says. But I know her. She’ll want a second one.