La maison vide

In 1976, my father reopened the house he had inherited from his mother, which had been closed for twenty years.
Inside: a piano, a chest of drawers with chipped marble, a Legion of Honour medal, photographs from which a face had been cut out with scissors.
A house filled with stories, where two world wars intersect, rural life in the first half of the twentieth century, but also Marguerite, my grandmother, her mother Marie-Ernestine, her mother, and all the men who gravitated around them.
All of them left their mark on the house and were gradually erased. I tried to bring them back into the light to understand what their story might have been, and its shadow cast on ours.

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