RATING: VERY GOOD
SPOILERS!!!
An event that triggers the end of the story is when Sister Laurence and Mother Veronique visit Chartres. Veronique was appointed Mother Superior when Mother Catherine visited Rome and fell in love with her friend Father Ignatius. The two of them decided to leave their religious lives and marry. Mother Veronique and Sister Laurence go to Chartres for the latter’s fiftieth birthday, and Sister Laurence runs into Agnes. In the convent Agnes was fond of Sister Laurence, who used to read stories to her, but she was afraid of Sister Veronique, so finding the two nuns in Chartres makes Agnes uncomfortable.
When Mother Veronique and Sister Laurence meet Madame Beck, things get complicated. Mother Veronique and Louise Beck hit it off, and Mother Veronique starts talking about Agnes and her past problems. Even when Mother Veronique returns to the convent, she sends Beck some cut-outs about the attack on the nanny. Horrible Madame Beck goes to Father Paul with the information, but the good father tries to ignore her.
A few other things happen. Father Bernard becomes worse and worse, and Agnes finds him in a terrible state one night. In the cathedral the father says that Satan is after him, and it is then that Agnes finds Piaf, Mrs Picot’s dog, which had gone missing. That night Agnes leaves Father Bernard the earring that was found in the basket where Agnes was left as a baby, and the next day Father Bernard commits suicide.
That weekend Agnes is to babysit Max, the nephew of a Philippe, who Agnes used to look after as a child. Philippe is very worried about his sister and the way she treats her son. Agnes babysits a few times, and that weekend Brigitte is to meet an ex-boyfriend, so she wants Agnes to look after Max. Agnes loves the baby and is happy to have him for two days. Brigitte returns late, and Agnes goes home. The next day Philippe comes to Agnes’s house and tells her that Max is in hospital. He has a broken wrist, and he is to have tests to check if there is damage in the boy’s brain. Now the police want to talk to Agnes.
Everybody is concerned about Agnes – Father Paul, Alain, her friend Terry, the painter Robert Clement.. – as she is nowhere to be found. Agnes has told the police that she would never hurt a child, let alone little Max, but she feels she is not believed. Feeling depressed, she hides in the crypt of the cathedral, and she even thinks of killing herself. Then Alain finds her and takes her to Father Paul’s , where she sleeps. When she wakes up, Agnes tells the father everything about her past. She confesses to having attacked the nanny, and she had the address because she stole her own file and asked another girl in the unit to read it for her, and she told her the address. So that is how she knew. What she doesn’t tell him is how she came to be pregnant in the first place. It is no surprise for me because I already suspected that she had been raped. The person who did it was not known to her, probably a farmer or some drifter. After Agnes tells him everything, Father Paul tells her that this is an incident that happened because, as she told him, she was off her head, and there is no reason why she should tell the police. Paul asks her what she thinks happened to Max, and she says that Brigitte must have hit him. That is what is true, and in the end she is deemed unsuitable and Philippe adopts his nephew.
Alain goes to find Agnes after her talk with Father Paul, and he confesses to loving her. Agnes is reticent because she hasn’t had much experience in love, and she even tells him about attacking the nanny. Alain doesn’t care, and they finally get together. In the epilogue we discover that they even have a child months later.
The last point worth mentioning is that Madame Beck is connected to Agnes. Louise Beck sees Agnes’s blue earring that Alain recovers in Father Paul’s rooms, and she claims the earring belongs to her. From Beck’s memories and suspicious we discover that she lost the earring in the restaurant that her husband had, and she suspects that the Algerian waitress found it, the same waitress that she found in a loving embrace with her husband, and who sent a letter some months later. So this means that the waitress was Agnes’s mother, and Beck’s husband her father. Agnes’s mother wrote to him because she found herself pregnant and alone, but Mrs Beck got rid of the letter. So even at the very beginning of her existence Mrs Beck made trouble for Agnes. Maybe if Mr Beck had read the letter, he would have helped Agnes’s mother, and Agnes would have grown up with her mum.
I really love the book. I like that it was written in the fairytale style, and even though it told terrible events, it was done in a tender way.
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