Nancy

Nancy is the city where Clémence has begun medical school, a setting she describes through the strain of arriving late to a demanding course and the friendships she built after finding her footing. Her account gives the city a sharply divided character: at first a bleak backdrop to academic exhaustion, it later becomes the home of a supportive student circle.

Studies and First Impressions

After a failed start at a preparatory program in Lille, Clémence switched to medical school and had completed her first year by the time she spoke about it. She arrived in the middle of the year, facing a crowd of 1,600 students before the selection cutoff. The scale of the cohort, the professors’ methodical contempt, and the phenomenal workload made her first semester especially difficult.

Clémence recalls the months up to March as a gray tunnel in which one day followed another without light or pleasure. Fatigue and competition compounded her difficulty adjusting, while Nancy itself seemed to her to consist of pretentious buildings and pathetic bars. Her description is personal rather than a neutral portrait of the city: the buildings and bars register the bleakness of a period in which she felt overwhelmed and out of place.

Finding a Rhythm

The first semester’s distress had a concrete consequence: Clémence wound up taking Prozac. Afterward, she began to catch the rhythm of her studies, and her overall situation had improved by the end of the first year. Nancy therefore marks a change in her experience as well as a location: the city associated with the gray stretch of her initial adjustment is also where she eventually established a more sustainable routine.

Friendship and Life Beyond Study

Clémence’s adjustment also took a social form. She created a small group of supportive, hardworking friends—Capucine, Marc, Blanche, Édouard, and Nassim—with whom she went to the library and partied. She also describes the group’s casual sexual encounters as part of how they built connections. Their shared life offers a contrast to the competition and isolation that shaped her early months in medical school.

By August, Clémence planned to go camping in the Cévennes with these friends for two weeks. The trip was still a plan, not an event that had already taken place, but it shows how far her account has moved from the lonely first semester: Nancy is the base of a circle that now extends into shared leisure and future plans.