paternalisms | full bio |

She remembers the reported consequences of the Chinese one-child policies, girls left for dead or drowned. She remembers the desperate French inheritance laws of yesteryear, favouring the natural heir - and the son always regarded as the natural, of course. Marie-Claude remembers a time when, perhaps, she could have understood why her father was so disappointed in how the only child he got was a daughter, but those times are past, and those parts of the world are half across the globe. She is his natural heir in a Ludon, the small, fiercely beating heart of Europe, where her gender should make no difference. She is his child in a society where, surely, she should be capable of proving herself enough.

Yet, Marie-Claude Barrault looks to her father, and she is never enough.

Seen from outside, possibly she could have made a greater effort to please him. Gone right, when he said right. Studied a "softer subject" at university, rather than insisting on a degree in political science, like him. Sought a position in his party, if she absolutely had to work in that same field. Marie-Claude absolutely had to, however. To go left, when told right. To become a politician, when he'd have preferred an academic. To become speech-writer for Jean Louis Girard, when her father had all but publicly disinherited him in Ludonian politics, even if Jean Louis refused to bend or bow.

Likewise, Marie-Claude also refuses, to believe that her sole job in this world is to please her father. He should be pleased quite naturally, because she is who she is and there's much to be pleased by, truly.

Nevertheless, sometimes, people do not live as nature intended. Marie-Claude studies political science and writes speeches for Tous La Liberté; later, she founds her own party, The Social-Liberals, in clear ideological opposition to her father's conservative values. And her father, the old mastodont at the helm of Parliament, at least the way it used to be, is not pleased.

That is the story. She cannot rewrite it. She will not.