Although Pierrot Fischer’s father didn’t die in the Great War, his mother Émilie always maintained it was the war that killed him. Pierrot wasn’t the only seven-year-old in Paris to live with just one parent. The boy who sat in front of him at school hadn’t laid eyes on his mother in the four years since she’d run off with an encyclopaedia salesman, while the classroom bully, who called Pierrot ‘Le Petit’ because he was so small, had a room above his grandparents’ tobacco shop on the Avenue de la MottePicquet, where he spent most of his time dropping water balloons from the upstairs window onto
the heads of passers-by below and then insisting that it had nothing to do with him. And in an apartment on the ground floor of his own building on the nearby Avenue CharlesFloquet, Pierrot’s best friend, Anshel Bronstein, lived alone with his mother, Mme Bronstein, his father having drowned two years earlier during an unsuccessful attempt to swim the English Channel. Having been born only weeks apart, Pierrot and Anshel had grown up practically as brothers, one mother taking care of both babies when the other needed a nap. But unlike a lot of brothers they never argued.