Un enfant, t. 3/3

A quiet stretch of Père‑Lachaise becomes a stage for sorrow, where a young woman returns each Sunday to a modest white marble tomb, laying white crowns soaked in tears. Her whispered prayers echo among the drooping willows, while a frail, infirm old man, supported by his aged servant, climbs the same path and joins her at the stone. Their eyes meet, and the elder’s voice breaks the stillness, “You knew my child?” – a question that pulls both into a shared past of grief.

The conversation unravels a tangled web of memory: the man insists the tomb holds his son Octave, while the woman is convinced it shelters her own daughter, whom she has mourned for six long years. When the black shroud is lifted and the epitaph reads “In memory of Octave‑Laurent Verrier, died at thirty‑one,” the woman's scream shatters the garden’s calm, revealing a devastating misidentification. The encounter leaves listeners poised on the edge of a mystery that asks how love, loss, and mistaken burial can intertwine in the very heart of a cemetery.