It begins like this, Jean. You were born around midday on 17 January 1928 at a clinic in Puteaux, which was then a small town just outside Paris on the western side, though the city has since engulfed it. Your mother had gone there to be with her parents, Louis and Cécile Millet.

Louis Millet, your grandfather, you loved. He was a baker, but his family's roots were among the vine growers of the Loire, the agricultural aristocracy. Consciousness of social position, though, he left to his wife, and in particular concern that their two daughters—Gabrielle (Bela) and Germaine, four and a half years younger—find husbands who would offer a way of life similar to the Millets' own: a standard of petit-bourgeois comfort and propriety supported by hard work. Madame Millet found what she was looking for, she thought, in the Barraqués.

The connection began almost a decade before you were born, in August 1919, when your aunt Bela was married to Martin Barraqué. That was when your parents, too, came together, for there they are in the wedding photograph, among the crowd of people striving in their formal clothes to live up to the occasion. They were the newly-weds' younger siblings, Germaine Millet and Grat Barraqué, serving as supporters at the ceremony.

There too in the photograph is your grandmother, with half her problem solved and, according to family tradition, the solution to the other half already revealing itself to her. If one Barraqué wedding, why not two?