Our boys challenged two of Cécile’s long-held official positions. First, that she believed no man alive could prove interesting before age forty. Second, that she found children sticky and generally reprehensible. She had avoided her own nieces and nephews with deft skill until they turned twenty, insisting to her sister, their mother, that no one could be depended upon to be rational before then and that she had no inclination for dealing with anyone so lacking in mental capacity.
