She was seventeen and she was in the workshop when they came.
That is the fact that four people in that town still know and that nobody has ever said to her face, and it is the reason she has never once been able to be in that building without doing a specific thing with her breathing.
It was ten past nine on a Saturday in April.
The doors were open because the doors were always open on a Saturday. There were three boats on trestles and a fourth on the racks, and there was a radio on, and her father was doing a plank end on the Delaunay boat with a spokeshave, and she was doing what she did on a Saturday morning, which was sanding and complaining.
Four men came in off the quay.
Nobody shouted.
That is the thing she has never been able to convey. There was no scene. One of them said, "Monsieur Roux," and her father put the spokeshave down on the bench — he put it down, carefully, in the right place, on the cloth, which she has thought about approximately eleven thousand times — and wiped his hands and said, "Oui."
And then he said, "Nadine, va chercher ta mère."
She did not go and fetch her mother.
She stood in that doorway and watched four men walk her father up the hill to a car on the square, past about ninety people who were doing their Saturday shopping and who stopped, and none of whom said one word.
Ninety people. On a Saturday. On the square.
There is a woman in that town who still crosses the road.
He came back eleven weeks later.
He was fifty-six. He had lost about nine kilos and he did not talk about any of it, then or ever, to her or to anybody, and he walked back into that workshop on a Tuesday afternoon in July and picked up the spokeshave off the cloth where he had left it.
And there were no orders.
That is the whole of what happened to Michel Roux and it is the entire mechanism and it does not require a single person in Ardres to have done anything wrong.
Nobody boycotted him. Nobody said anything. There was no meeting.
Eleven people who had boats with him simply did not ring, and four of them went to a man at Gravelines instead, and the Delaunay boat sat on those trestles three-quarters finished for eighteen months, and Michel Roux died in the November of the following year of something the doctors called one thing and his wife called another.