Maude was bored. It was dark out and the angsty 13-year-old was roaming around her home near Nancy, in eastern France. When she came across a mirror, it reflected the questions that had troubled her teenage years back at her. Who did those high cheekbones and dark hair belong to? Where did those dark eyes and angular features come from? What about her athletic body, both robust and slender? Maude looked like her mother but had none of her father's traits.

For two years now, the young girl had been having doubts. She had come up with a theory. Her mother had cheated on her father. She was such a powerful woman, "a lioness," while her father sometimes seemed so weak to her. Since the age of two and her parents' divorce, Maude had been torn between two lives. The life of her father, the world at home, the parties where she was the only child. And then her mother's well-ordered family life where she was a well-behaved little girl. She had an older brother and two younger sisters on her mother's side. But she was the only child from the short, tumultuous union of her two parents, between 1978 and 1984.

That evening in 1995, Maude was strolling along the mezzanine in the office-cum-library. There were whole shelves filled with books, but none of them appealed to her. She came across a large, familiar archive file, the kind of household object that is part of the décor. It had a label: "Divorce Pierre" (the first name has been changed). What causes life's upheavals? "I'll read this," she said to herself that evening for lack of something else.

Discovering a vast group of siblings

The divorce was long and messy. Her parents had been on bad terms and quarreling for years. She already knew this because the police was called one day: Her father had come to pick her up for the holidays, but her mother disagreed with him about the dates. She flipped through pages and pages of lawyers' letters and relatives' testimonies before coming across one particular document: "Born by anonymous sperm donation."

Maude put the file back on the shelf. She went to her room and cried all night. The next morning, her mother noticed that she was not feeling well and asked her why. She answered her daughter's questions. Yes, she had been donor-conceived because her father couldn't have children. They had gone to see the gynecologist, who had referred them to the Center for the Study and Conservation of Human Eggs and Sperm (CECOS) of Nancy, where they lived. "It worked on the first try," said her mother.

You have 90.97% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.