« La fléchette dans le cœur »

« La fléchette dans le cœur » is an image Bénédicte Ombredanne uses in a hurried farewell to Éric Reinhardt, while asking him to suspend their contact. It gives emotional shape to a connection she must conceal, and later returns in Éric’s writing as he tries to reach her again. Its movement from dart to book makes the phrase a small record of both intimacy and interruption.

The phrase at the point of separation

In March 2009, after several weeks without news from Bénédicte, Éric receives an urgent call from her. She explains that Jean-François has found a second phone hidden in her office library, after its quiet text-message alert drew his attention. The messages on it were tender but not explicit. To deflect his suspicion from the man with whom she had been corresponding, Bénédicte told her husband that the messages came from Éric, whom Jean-François knew she had met to discuss literature.

Bénédicte tells Éric that she has promised to end their communication and asks him not to answer calls from her phone or an unknown number. She says she will contact him when the situation has settled, then closes the call by invoking the dart that she will wait to have lodged in her heart. The image offers a compact counterpoint to the danger surrounding the conversation: contact is being stopped, yet the metaphor preserves an expectation of feeling and of a possible return.

A connection under pressure

The phrase’s circumstances make its hope deliberately uncertain. Bénédicte is speaking quickly and quietly because she fears being overheard; the message is not a declaration that she can freely pursue the relationship, but a farewell shaped by the immediate need to protect herself and the other person. Her explanation also makes Éric an unwitting cover for a separate correspondence. He agrees that she was right to protect herself, though he privately feels unsettled at being drawn into a deception without warning.

After the call, Bénédicte disappears from his life for months. Éric is disappointed that she does not follow up to say whether the subterfuge worked, and he does not initiate contact. In April 2010 she sends him a birthday email, which he leaves unanswered; neither resumes the exchange. The dart therefore remains suspended: the phrase anticipates renewed communication, but the narrative first associates it with a long silence.

From dart to book

In April 2011, Éric writes to Bénédicte. He recalls the dart she had mentioned in spring 2008 and sets it against the substantial book he has just completed: both, he observes, can be thrown, but their impact differs. The playful comparison makes the earlier image newly mutual. What had been Bénédicte’s intimate figure of an awaited emotional arrival becomes Éric’s way of opening a conversation and trying to make amends for his own year of silence.

The email is more than a light allusion. Éric says that he will send her the book after it leaves the printer, with a discreetly coded dedication to avoid arousing her husband’s suspicions. He also confides that, despite the positive reception from early readers, he fears the novel falls short of his previous work. He tells her that she is the only person to whom he will admit how deeply he has doubted himself while writing it. The phrase thus marks a channel of trust as well as a flirtatious metaphor: Éric turns it into a bridge toward a renewed exchange and a personal confession.

The image’s changing weight

The transformation from dart to book preserves the original idea of an object reaching its target, while changing its scale and force. The dart suggests a small, precise emotional impact; Éric’s book is a weightier substitute, offered with humor but also carrying the vulnerability of his doubts about his work. His reply does not resolve the separation or establish what follows between them. Instead, the repeated image makes the gap itself legible: Bénédicte’s hoped-for contact, the silence that followed, and Éric’s later attempt to send something back.