“Dominique”

“Dominique” is a radio tune performed by Sœur Sourire that becomes an unexpected source of courage during the narrator’s search through Rouen for a doctor willing to perform an abortion. The song’s cheerful melody carries her onward through an aimless afternoon, and the later story of its singer transforms that brief comfort into a lasting bond across time.

The Song on the Streets of Rouen

On a wan November afternoon, the narrator walks through Rouen, having set out to find a doctor who might agree to perform an abortion. After looking at doctors’ brass plaques without managing to ring a bell, she heads toward Martainville, a rough working-class district where she imagines she may find greater understanding. Near the Place St-Marc, among empty market stalls and familiar streets, she begins humming the refrain, “Dominique, nique, nique.”

Sœur Sourire, a Dominican nun who also strummed the guitar, performed the tune, which was often played on the radio. Its lyrics strike the narrator as edifying and somewhat naive: the singer does not know the contemporary meaning of niquer. Yet the melody is gay and lively, and its effect is more immediate than its words. It gives the narrator the heart to go on as she wanders without direction, no longer even noticing the plaques she had set out to inspect.

A Singer’s Later Life

About ten years after that walk, the narrator reads in Le Monde that Sœur Sourire has died by suicide. The article recounts the reversal in the singer’s life after the enormous success of “Dominique”: conflict with the clergy, departure from the religious order, and a move to live with a woman. She eventually gives up singing, sinks into obscurity, and takes to drinking.

The news moves the narrator deeply because the woman described in the article seems so far from the figure whose music had accompanied her earlier walk. Sœur Sourire could not have imagined becoming, in the narrator’s account, a social misfit, an alcoholic, and a renegade sister with homosexual proclivities. But the later knowledge does not erase the earlier moment of support. It changes its resonance: the voice that gave the narrator courage belonged to a woman who, at another point in time, would herself lose her bearings.

Shared Disorientation and Retrospective Irony

The narrator connects the singer’s eventual life with her own solitary wandering in Martainville. They had both lost their bearings, though at different moments. In the original afternoon, the song’s lively sound gives courage without the narrator knowing what lies ahead for its singer; only later does the tune acquire the shadow of Sœur Sourire’s decline and death.

The narrator hopes that life brought the singer some small glimmer of happiness. That hope is joined to a bitter, playful turn on the word niquer: having learned its contemporary meaning, the singer might, the narrator imagines, have told herself on lonely, whisky-sodden evenings that she had, after all, screwed all the other nuns. The pun does not undo the account of loneliness or alcoholism. Instead, it lets the narrator imagine a moment of defiant pleasure within a life remembered as a fall from fame and religious belonging.

Place in a Chain of Women

Sœur Sourire belongs to a wider, invisible company of women the narrator has never met and may have little in common with, but who nevertheless remain close to her heart. The company includes artists, authors, literary heroines, and figures from childhood, whether real or fictional, living or dead. The narrator feels that these women embrace her own story.

Within that connection, “Dominique” is more than a remembered radio tune. It links a specific act of listening during a desperate search with the later knowledge of the singer’s life, allowing the narrator to recognize an affinity that neither shared circumstance nor personal acquaintance required. The song’s bright melody first sustains her in the streets; the singer’s later fate makes that transient encounter part of the narrator’s continuing sense of kinship with other women.