Serge Simon

Serge Simon is an established friend of the Chaussoy family whose attention to Stéphanie Chaussoy shifts from familiar teasing to sexualized scrutiny. Seen through Stéphanie’s adolescent perspective, he embodies both the confidence and material authority of adult men and the unease of being watched by one. The portrait does not resolve her mixed response: she is frightened by his attention, yet also drawn to the recognition it seems to offer.

Identity and Place in the Family Circle

Serge has known Stéphanie since she was a little girl. He visits the family for drinks, hunts with her father, Pierre Chaussoy, and shares ownership of a boat with him, anchored in the harbor at Mandelieu-la-Napoule. These ties make him more than a stranger who appears at dinner: he belongs to the adults’ established social world, with its shared leisure and long-standing familiarity. That closeness also makes the change in his behavior harder for Stéphanie to place.

Serge is married to Myreille and has two daughters. The elder is finishing pharmacy school in Lyon; the younger is in the United States, where Stéphanie imagines her enjoying the kind of attractive campus she has seen in movies, whatever the younger daughter may actually be doing there. This glimpse of Serge’s family life is filtered through Stéphanie’s speculation, rather than presented as a full account of his daughters. It nevertheless places him among adults whose children have educational opportunities and lives that Stéphanie can only picture from the outside.

From Familiar Teasing to Sexual Attention

Two years earlier, Serge’s manner toward Stéphanie had been that of an older family friend: he pinched her nose, told stupid jokes, and gave her a Swiss Army knife for her fourteenth birthday. Since then, she has begun to catch him staring at her legs or looking into her eyes. The reversal is small in outward form but significant in her perception: gestures once absorbed into the routine of family familiarity now seem charged, and Serge’s effort to recover his composure when caught only makes the change more noticeable to her.

Stéphanie and Clémence turn his awkward laughter into a joke between themselves, mimicking its forced, chesty sound and ridiculing him. The humor gives them a way to name and manage what they see, but it does not erase Stéphanie’s uncertainty. Her account preserves the gap between their comic verdict on Serge and the more complicated fact that his attention affects her.

At a dinner attended by Serge and Myreille, Serge drinks two whiskeys and roughly a bottle of rosé before asking Stéphanie whether she shaves her pubic hair. He has read in VSD that girls are doing so. The people around the table perform shock; Pierre objects, although he is even drunker than Serge, while the narration observes that the question was also regarded as worth asking. The scene places Serge’s sexual curiosity inside the adult gathering’s drinking and joking, where apparent disapproval coexists with indulgence. Stéphanie says little that evening and does not make a special effort to attract him; she is barefoot, wearing a low-cut tank top, and moves about the house looking grumpy.

The Adult Gaze and Stéphanie’s Ambivalence

When Myreille is present, Serge generally behaves himself. After dessert, however, he tends to seek Stéphanie out, appearing at the living-room entrance or opening the door to her bedroom to offer a familiar good-night. His lowered, carefully modulated voice and affectionate manner strike her as unsettling rather than reassuring. She says that it scares her a little, but also that she does not mind being watched by a successful man. Neither reaction cancels the other.

Stéphanie’s reflections widen from Serge to the men who seem to circle her: their heavy bodies, broad shoulders, cigarette breath, strength, hairiness, and hands. She is wary of them and attracted to them at once. Their appeal is also social and material in her imagination: German cars, credit cards, family support, costly business-school tuition for children, a boat, opinions, debts, mistresses, and the possibility of becoming mayor. These details are not a separate biography of Serge; they are the inventory through which Stéphanie understands the adult power he represents. Her concluding image of that power shrinking in the presence of a girl captures the scene’s uneasy reversal: the men appear formidable, yet their attention makes them seem vulnerable to the very adolescent they overawe.