“On a quiet Saturday afternoon, Aurore Raguet, a fifty-year-old mail carrier, followed her route through the streets of Revin, a small French town near the Belgian border. The houses in Revin are sturdy boxes in gray, white, and the color of wet sand. Aurore stopped at one of them, making her way through its untended lawn to the front door.
Jeannine Titeux, the owner of the house, appeared after the fifth knock. “You’re early,” she said. Jeannine, who is eighty-eight years old, wore her short hair, dyed light brown, tucked behind her ears. She led Aurore inside, into a living room so rigorously decorated that it inspired good posture. Aurore took careful steps past a candelabra with blue candlesticks, a pyramid of green digestif glasses, and a miniature plaster nude on a fluted pillar. She smiled and glanced down at her tablet. Ordinarily, she uses it to scan packages. Now it displayed a list of scripted lines designed to initiate conversation:
Introduce yourself to the client and talk about a subject that might interest her.
What weather we’re having!
Did you watch TV last night?
Have you received any visits lately?
Jeannine didn’t need any prompting. She launched into a story about the time when, as the wife of Revin’s mayor, she had directed the town’s ballet school; she had allowed a young girl with polio to dance. “I don’t know what became of her,” Jeannine said, addressing the room. Aurore listened. A month of these weekly visits plus an emergency-call button costs Jeannine €37.90. The fee is collected by La Poste, the French postal service, as part of a program called Veiller Sur Mes Parents (“Watch Over My Parents”). Every day except Sunday, postal workers inform the program’s subscribers, through an app, if their elderly relatives are “well”: if they require assistance with groceries, home repairs, outings, or “other needs.” Since V.S.M.P. was introduced, in 2017, about six thousand elderly women and fifteen hundred elderly men have been enrolled across the country. The program mandates no minimum visit time, but data collected by La Poste shows that conversations tend to last from six to fifteen minutes, long enough to soft- or hard-boil an egg. At the end of each visit, the elderly person signs the carrier’s tablet, providing proof of life as though accepting a package.”
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