Le Mont-Dore

Le Mont-Dore is the setting of a winter trip the narrator takes with P while postponing a planned clandestine abortion. The town offers a brief interval before she must seek help in Paris, but not relief from the pregnancy: the holiday’s snowbound activities become an attempt to end it without making the journey to the abortion provider. In later recollection, the place survives less as a coherent town than as sharply contrasted fragments of a map, nightlife, snow, and light.

The town in memory

The narrator’s later effort to recover Le Mont-Dore begins with a town plan in a Michelin guide. She reads street names including Rue Meynadier, Rue Sidoine-Apollinaire, Rue Montlozier, Rue du Capitaine-Chazotte, and Place du Panthéon, and notes that the town has a spa and the River Dordogne running through it. Yet this documentary detail does not restore her personal experience: she remarks that she might as well never have set foot there. The gap between what a map can establish and what memory can retrieve defines the town’s retrospective presence.

What returns instead are fragments from the holiday: diary notes about dancing at the Casino and meeting at La Tannerie and La Grange, alongside the crowded café where the group gathered in the late afternoon and the jukebox played If I Had a Hammer. The recollection does not reconstruct the trip as a continuous itinerary. It holds onto a few social settings and a recurring image of snow, leaving the town itself partly inaccessible.

A pause before seeking help

The trip to the Massif Central was, in practical terms, a costly delay. The narrator doubted whether P wanted to see her again and knew that spending some of the money set aside for the abortion was unwise. She had never been to the mountains, however, and wanted a few weeks’ grace before confronting the abortion provider in Paris’s 17th arrondissement. Le Mont-Dore therefore marks a postponement rather than a solution: the journey temporarily interrupts the search for help while consuming money needed for it.

The holiday’s social arrangements sharpen the distance between the narrator’s private crisis and the group’s apparent leisure. P and the narrator stay at a modest inn, while Annick and Gontran, two law students who do not know that she is pregnant or intends to have an abortion, stay at an expensive old-fashioned hotel. The four share banter and outings, including dancing and films, but the narrator cannot join their carefree mood. P avoids raising the matter with the others and darkens when she mentions it; she doubts that he has seriously sought a solution. The trip thus places an urgent, concealed problem inside an ordinary student holiday.

The mountain as an attempted escape

In Le Mont-Dore, the narrator redirects her attention toward strenuous activity, hoping effort or a fall might end the pregnancy and spare her a visit to the provider. When Annick lends her ski equipment she could not afford to rent, she repeatedly tumbles and imagines each fall might bring the outcome she wants. The borrowed gear enables the effort, but the falls do not resolve the crisis.

One day, after P and Annick decline to climb farther, the narrator continues with Gontran toward the summit of Puy Jumel. Wearing fake-leather boots that let in snow, she presses on through the powder with the conviction that reaching the top and pushing past her limits could make the embryo let go. Her exertion becomes an attempted substitute for the planned procedure: she wears herself out in the hope that the effort will end the pregnancy. The account presents the climb as driven by desperation, not as a successful method; the unresolved need to seek help remains.

Narrative significance

In the later account, Le Mont-Dore condenses the conflict between delay and decision. The narrator’s holiday consumes some of the money she needs and gives her a few weeks before she faces the abortion provider, yet its central physical episode is an attempt to avoid that very encounter. The snow and the climb preserve the intensity of the effort, while the map and scattered diary entries show how little of the town’s full geography remains accessible to memory.

The recollection also connects an individual crisis to the conditions surrounding clandestine abortion. Help depends on practical knowledge, money, and people willing to share what they know; an earlier account of LB’s referral establishes the provider’s fee as four hundred francs and describes the risks that remained despite precautions. Against that context, the narrator’s use of a holiday and strenuous skiing as an attempted alternative exposes the narrowness of her options. Le Mont-Dore is not simply a scenic interlude: it is the place where postponement, limited resources, and the desire to escape an unwanted pregnancy converge.