Simon Rotier

Simon Rotier belongs to one of Heillange’s prominent families, but he is introduced less through its respectable public standing than through the languid, drug-taking party scene around him. He becomes Stéphanie Chaussoy’s boyfriend in a recurrent cycle of breakups and reconciliations, yet her account of their intimacy reveals a pronounced imbalance: Simon keeps her separate from his friends, sees other girls, and makes time for her chiefly on his own terms. His later departure for California abruptly disrupts a summer plan that had become a measure of Stéphanie and Clémence’s closeness as well as his place in their lives.

Family Background and Local Standing

The Rotiers are presented as a family with substantial standing in and beyond Heillange. Simon and his brother are described as spoiled troublemakers who regard themselves as lords of the valley, while their wider family has made its mark in politics, pharmacy, engineering, business, and medicine. Rotiers hold responsible posts in training and management and work in licensed professions; some have established themselves as far away as Paris and Toulouse. Simon’s adolescence therefore sits against a background of inherited professional respectability, not social obscurity.

The family’s local political prominence is especially visible in the account of Simon’s uncle, who served as mayor for thirty years before pancreatic cancer forced him to step aside. Even when gravely ill, the uncle continued to walk around town, and he died without resigning his position as a town councillor. This history gives the Rotier name a civic dimension as well as a family one. Simon and his brother’s difficult adolescence is set beside that legacy, exposing a contrast between the authority associated with the family and the unruly conduct of its younger generation.

The Party and Anthony’s First Impression

At a party, Simon appears among a small group gathered with Stéphanie and Clémence near the French doors. He stands out to Anthony Casati as the boy in a leather jacket: attractive, dirty-haired, and cultivated in a way Anthony reads as both laid-back and pretentious. The detail is comic in the oppressive heat of the room, where the temperature is about eighty-five degrees. The song Let It Be plays as the group sits close together in a languorous mood, separating them from the more crowded, openly sexual scene elsewhere in the living room.

Simon takes a small vial from his pocket, sniffs from it, and passes it to Stéphanie; the others take turns, then laugh in prolonged, sick-sounding bursts before sinking back into torpor. The effect appears quickly and fades within a minute. As the vial begins to circulate again, Anthony approaches. When Anthony takes it, Simon mimics sniffing and urges him on. Clémence intervenes, telling Simon to leave Anthony alone. The encounter is brief, but it gives Simon an early pattern of social ease and provocation: he belongs to a group whose intimacy Anthony wants to enter, and he makes Anthony’s insecurity part of the moment.

Anthony’s cousin later identifies the two boys as Hunk and Leather Jacket and explains that they are the Rotier brothers. Their name supplies a social context that Anthony had not initially recognized. In the party scene, Simon is not simply an attractive stranger: he is part of a locally powerful family, and the group’s relaxed closeness contrasts with Anthony’s feeling of inadequacy and smallness. That contrast is filtered through Anthony’s perspective; it establishes the distance he feels without making Simon’s own thoughts known.

Stéphanie’s Boyfriend

Stéphanie’s relationship with Simon is described as complicated and emotionally wearing. When Anthony asks whether she has a boyfriend, she talks at length about a boy who is extremely attractive but behaves badly, alternately showing interest in her and acting as if she does not exist. She tries to understand him as complicated, mentioning his reading of Camus and Go Ask Alice, even as she admits that his conduct is driving her crazy. Her account conveys both her attachment and the rationalizations she makes around it. Anthony soon regrets asking, while Stéphanie continues to revisit the pain; her monologue makes the relationship legible as something she is still trying to interpret rather than a settled romance.

By the time Stéphanie and Clémence are anticipating the summer, Simon and Stéphanie are widely regarded as a couple despite their standard sequence of breakups, emotional upheavals, reconciliations, and separations. The label of girlfriend gives their connection public definition, but the recurring instability remains part of it. Stéphanie’s later, more blunt account to Clémence describes the cost of that arrangement: Simon never properly introduced her as his girlfriend, and at his home she felt she could have been any boy. They did not go out alone together; he slept with her when he wanted, saw too many other girls while they were together, and did not bring her into his social circle. He never skipped a party to see her and never took her to a restaurant. Her conclusion is that he did not care about her. The intimacy she describes is thus marked less by mutual recognition than by Simon’s control over when and where the relationship exists.

The Broken Summer Plan

The Rotiers own a house in the Basque Country near Biarritz, a sheepfold facing the ocean where a select group is invited each August. Stéphanie and Clémence receive invitations for the first time, making the trip a particular honor and an important shared prospect. At the same time, Stéphanie’s parents are making demands on her: her father wants an offspring with diplomas, and she has been pushed into an exhausting routine of study and driving practice. The vacation is already under threat, so Simon’s news lands in a summer that matters to her for more than leisure.

Simon explains that he is taking the place of his older cousin Julien, who had been due to spend a month on the West Coast with a family of psychologists but broke his leg roller-skating. Simon’s bags are packed, and he is due to leave in three days for Carmel, California. He calls it a golden opportunity and says he cannot pass it up, while apologizing to Stéphanie and Clémence. Stéphanie answers by asking whether he is simply ditching them. His departure is practical and sudden: an accident in his family opens a place on a long-arranged trip, and Simon accepts it rather than keep the summer plan with them.

Later Life and Narrative Role

Years later, Clémence reports that Simon is loafing his way through a business school in the Paca area, with windsurfing and electronic music as his main interests. He is back in Heillange when she runs into him. Asked what he is like, she answers that he is the same as ever. The novel supplies no detailed account of what has changed in his life between the California trip and this later return; instead, that brief report echoes the earlier portrait of a young man moving easily through opportunities while Stéphanie bears much of the emotional uncertainty of their relationship.

Simon’s appearances connect several forms of privilege without making him a fully explored viewpoint character: the established Rotier family, the social ease of the party group, the sexual and emotional imbalance of his relationship with Stéphanie, and the mobility represented by a month in California and business school elsewhere. His defining recurrence is not a dramatic transformation but a pattern of inconsistency. He is repeatedly accepted as Stéphanie’s boyfriend, yet his conduct keeps the relationship from becoming reciprocal or secure; later, the description of him as unchanged leaves that pattern hanging over his return.