Le cœur en slush bleue

Le cœur en slush bleue is the novel’s central image for Billie’s love of Pierre: a blue raspberry slush turns a color associated with their summer encounters into a bodily, unstable feeling that both excites and overwhelms her. It binds attraction to memory, while the image of melting slush gives that feeling a tenderness and a chill that resist any simple fairy-tale ideal.

A Color That Holds Summer

After a night that frightened her somewhat and proved awkward rather than romantically perfect, Billie looks back on her summer through the color blue. The season’s leaves are still green, but the air is cold and the sky has grown gray; blue, she says, now gives her shivers. Its associations are specific: the slush that colored her tongue, her first meeting with Pierre at the convenience store, his house of the same color, and the soft sweater that smelled of bicycle tire, sport, and the outdoors. The color makes a chain of physical memories, so that the end of summer cannot erase the encounters it preserves.

Falling for Pierre’s Colors

Billie names the force behind her attraction directly: she has fallen in love with colors. Pierre’s blond hair and blue eyes make him seem singular to her, as do the details of his life as she sees them: he serves burgers, rides a bicycle, and appears in the newspapers. Her description moves from visible features to their effect on her body. Pierre makes her blush, puts stars in her eyes, and brings dimples to her cheeks; the blue-and-blond image is not merely a portrait of him but the form her exhilaration takes.

Pierre’s Many Hearts

The slush image becomes more complicated when Billie imagines Pierre as containing many different hearts. Some are soft, others hard; she associates them with sunscreen, the aftertaste of beer, a sad song, brasserie burgers, and rock. She has recently glimpsed a naked heart that might taste of calamine and another that approached discomfort. These contrasting images keep Pierre from being only the bright, beautiful figure of her infatuation: tenderness and hardness coexist within him, and the hearts remain hidden from view.

Among them, Billie identifies the heart that makes the others beat as a blue-raspberry-slush heart. It melts and melts, yet chills her forehead. The image holds sweetness and discomfort together: attraction is vivid and pleasurable, but it is not safe, steady, or entirely under her control. The slush’s melting makes the feeling seem transient even as its chill leaves a bodily mark.

Billie’s Divided Heart

Against Pierre’s multitude, Billie sets her own two hearts: one belonging to a girl, the other to a woman. They mix despite her, and the mixture hurts each time. The contrast makes the blue slush more than an emblem of a crush. It belongs to a summer in which Billie is negotiating desire and growing up, with feeling arriving as physical sensation before she can make it orderly or painless.

The image also sits beside Billie’s recognition that her real experience has not resembled a story of roses, promises, and a perfect prince. Her story is awkward and imperfect, but she considers it unique and recognizably hers. The blue heart therefore does not promise a flawless romance; it gives shape to a particular, remembered feeling, one that can still make her shiver after the season has changed.