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tolerance and open-mindedness. But it was very amusing. As Jacob got older, he gradually stopped being satisfied with merely singing like Céline; he started speaking like her and giving interviews to absent interviewers in a Canadian accent. He’d do Céline, and he’d do her husband René, too. It was funny. We’d laugh. Jacob imitated her to perfection. We’d ask him questions, I mean, we’d talk to Jacob and he’d answer as Céline. It was very amusing. It was really very amusing. I don’t know what went wrong. How did we go from a childish passion to this … I don’t know what to call it … to this derangement of his spirit? Of his very being?… One evening when all three of us were at the kitchen table, Lionel told Jacob he was tired of listening to him and his Québécois clownery. I’d made salt pork and lentils, a little dish my two men were usually crazy about, but this time there was something sad in the air. It was like the feeling you get when you’re alone with someone and the other person withdraws into himself and you see that withdrawal as an omen of abandonment. Jacob pretended not to know the meaning of the word
clownery
. He replied to his father in Québécois French, declaring that although he’d been living in France for some time, he was a Canadian woman who had no intention of disavowing her origins. Raising his voice, Lionel said Jacob’s act was getting to the point where it wasn’t funny anymore, and Jacob answered that he couldn’t keep up this “squabbling” because he had to protect his vocal cords. After that awful night, we started living withCéline Dion in Jacob Hutner’s body. We were no longer called Papa and Maman, but Lionel and Pascaline. And we no longer had any relationship with our real son. At first we thought we were dealing with a temporary crisis, one of those little delirious phases teenagers go through. But when Bogdana, our cleaning lady, came and told us that Jacob had very graciously (she was on the point of finding him too good-natured for such a major star) requested a humidifier for his voice, I sensed that things were taking a turn for the worse. Without saying anything to Lionel – sometimes men are too prosaic – I consulted a magnetic therapist. I’d heard about people being possessed by entities. The magnetic therapist explained that Céline Dion wasn’t an entity and that therefore he wasn’t in a position to disengage her from Jacob. An entity is a vagabond soul that attaches itself to a living person. The therapist couldn’t liberate a boy inhabited by someone who sang in Las Vegas every night, he said, and he advised me to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. The word
psychiatrist
stuck in my throat like a cotton-wool plug. A certain amount of time had to pass before I felt capable of uttering that word at home. Lionel proved to be more realistic. I would never have been able to get through this trial without Lionel’s stability. Lionel. My husband. My own. True to himself, never pushy, never inclined to devious ways. One day Robert said Lionel was a man on the lookout for joy, a man in search of happiness, but happiness of a “cubic” kind. We laughed at this roguish remark, and I even gave Robert a little slap. But all things considered, he had a point: cubic. Solid. Upright on every side. We got Jacob to see a psychiatrist by persuading him that the doctor was an ear, nose, and throat specialist. The psychiatristrecommended a stay in a private hospital. I was shattered when I saw how easily our child could be manipulated. Jacob strode cheerfully into the mental clinic, convinced that he was entering a recording studio, a kind of studiohotel reserved for stars of his stature so they wouldn’t have to go back and forth every day. When we stepped into the bare, white room on that first morning, I came near to falling at his feet and begging his forgiveness for such treachery. We’ve told everybody that Jacob has left the