In a previous book, Count Your Days, I alluded to those few years of my early childhood, when I saw my parents “like a city struggling against itself in the heart of a hotel district teeming with palaces, casinos, and foreign queens whose days were numbered in that era.” The narrative we have just read was born of a desire to reveal all that was hidden in simple, everyday matters, and it responds to a deep need in me, which is to find again the language of each person and each hour of that time. It alone will allow me, at this moment and in this circumstance, to relive those short years with the heart and eyes of the child I was, trying as much as I could to distance my adult self from them so as not to spoil with it—though I did not always succeed—the unity of tone imposed by this kind of narrative. Alice Rivaz studied music and practiced painting, but turned to writing and journalism. She is the only daughter of a devout Protestant mother and a socialist father who was active in the party in Switzerland. This ideological difference between the parents influenced her consciousness since childhood and was reflected in her writings. However, she was more sympathetic to her mother, whom she loved greatly. This sympathy expanded to include women in general, giving her writings a feminist tone. However, it is a broad-minded feminist, and more importantly, she expresses it in a refined literary style that has given her a prominent position in Switzerland and Europe as one of the most important Francophone writers.