Annie Duchesne’s relationship with P

Annie Duchesne’s relationship with P, a political science student she met during a summer vacation, is recounted through the growing divide between their shared intimacy and the crisis she faced largely alone. After she became pregnant, she told P she intended to have an abortion, but his distant correspondence and evasive conduct during a planned holiday left her to pursue help without dependable support from him. The relationship’s ending was not a mutual resolution so much as a boundary she declared after months of uncertainty.

Beginning and Pregnancy

Annie Duchesne met P during the summer vacation and later went to see him in Bordeaux. In early October, they were intimate on several occasions. She knew that, according to the Ogino method, the timing put her at risk of pregnancy, yet she could not imagine that pregnancy would result. In retrospect, the familiar images of Bordeaux—the room overlooking Cours Pasteur, the narrow bed, the Café Montaigne, and the cinema—acquired a single, unsettling meaning: she had been there without knowing that she was becoming pregnant.

The pregnancy transformed the relationship’s circumstances before it changed its outward form. Annie Duchesne understood that she did not intend to continue the pregnancy and wrote to P to tell him both that she was pregnant and that she planned to abort. She also recalls taking pleasure in disturbing his carefree attitude. That pleasure did not mean she expected him to resist her decision: she believed he would be relieved to learn she did not intend to have a child. Her account presents the disclosure as deliberate and clear, even as the practical consequences remained uncertain.

Unequal Responsibility

P’s responses came in infrequent letters from Bordeaux, where he alluded to the many problems obstructing a solution. Annie Duchesne’s diary registered the imbalance plainly: she felt that he was leaving her to cope on her own. Looking back, she interpreted his letters as signs that he no longer cared and wanted to resume his untroubled life, focused on examinations and his future career. She acknowledges that she may have sensed this at the time but did not have the courage to end the relationship as well as confront the urgent search for an abortion.

Her refusal to face what his distance might mean was, in her later account, conscious. She could not bear the thought of boys joking in cafés while imagining P doing the same in Bordeaux, yet that image also gave her a reason to keep disrupting his peaceful routine. The relationship thus became a source of both hurt and leverage: she did not believe he was solving the crisis, but continued to insist on its presence in his life rather than accept his apparent return to ordinary concerns.

The Holiday in Le Mont-Dore

A Christmas holiday in Le Mont-Dore had been arranged in October with another young couple. Annie Duchesne kept to the plan despite knowing that the trip would consume some of the money needed for an abortion and take her away from the next steps she feared. She explains that she had never been to the mountains and needed a few weeks’ grace before facing the appointment in Paris. The decision was not evidence that the crisis had receded; it gave her a temporary interval before she had to confront it directly.

P and Annie Duchesne stayed at a modest inn, while their better-off companions stayed in an expensive, old-fashioned hotel. The contrast belongs to the holiday’s social setting, but the more consequential divide was what the other couple did not know. Annick and Gontran, both law students, were unaware of the pregnancy and the intended abortion. P had not considered it necessary to tell them. He dismissed them as bourgeois and conformist, and appeared anxious not to spoil the vacation by raising what he treated as an unfortunate matter. Whenever Annie Duchesne brought it up, his face darkened. He had apparently found no solution in Bordeaux; she doubted that he had made a serious attempt to find one.

The four companions pursued the holiday’s ordinary pleasures—dancing, films, and easy conversation. Annie Duchesne tried to share their enthusiasm but found that her attention remained fixed on finding a way to end the pregnancy. She remembers arguments with P that led to tears and sulks, though not their words, and cannot now say exactly what she expected from him. She allows that she may have wanted him to recognize the abortion as a sacrifice approaching an act of love, even though she had made the decision in her own interest. This retrospective uncertainty complicates any simple account of the relationship: she was determined to act for herself, while still wanting the significance of that act to register with P.

Separation and Its Context

On January 16 and 17, while waiting for the next stage of the abortion process, Annie Duchesne wrote to P that she never wanted to see him again. The letter made explicit the break that her account of the holiday had been approaching: she could no longer sustain the connection while feeling that its most serious consequences were hers to manage. The decision coincided with her continued effort to obtain an abortion, so separation did not resolve the crisis; it removed the expectation that P would share it as a partner.

The relationship unfolded under the pressure of a law that made abortion clandestine and dangerous. Annie Duchesne’s broader account describes that law as present in ordinary speech, medical encounters, and social judgments, while her working-class background sharpened her sense of the stigma attached to an unintended pregnancy. These pressures do not explain away P’s choices, but they show why his distance mattered so much: she needed practical support in circumstances where doctors and other sources of help could be difficult to approach. The account does not offer a later reconciliation or a full explanation of P’s motives. Instead, it preserves the contrast between his infrequent, problem-focused letters and her sustained search for a solution, ending with her own written refusal of further contact.