The story is completely original, not the frame itself, a family saga, but by its narrator. Indeed, it is the home that will tell his story and, through it, that of a family. Family saga, then, but in a saga like its narrator, almost contemplative. It seems that Diane MEUR took over all the cliches of the novel of the nineteenth century: a dashing and ambitious young man became cantankerous patriarch and full of disappointments, docile and unhappy wives, daughters who escape physically or mentally incompetent heirs all combine to paint a large mural flamboyant. Yet the flamboyance is not there. Is it due to the decor, this Galicia lost the borders of Europe, piece of Poland annexed by Austria? In this house, immovable in her dowager numb drowsiness?
