6:10 p.m.

6:10 p.m. is the hour Bénédicte associates with the afternoon she spends with Christian, a precise point on the clock that becomes a private memorial to an experience she calls the happiest of her life. Its significance grows from the arrow-shaped hands she notices in Christian’s room: time, the memory of archery, and the lovers’ encounter converge in a single image.

The clock and its arrows

A seventeenth-century oil portrait of an ecclesiastic hangs above a chest holding a bronze nude, perfume bottles, and a clock. The clock’s two arrow-shaped hands recall the arrows Bénédicte had shot, each ending, in her imagination, like a sharp circumflex accent. The objects are not merely room furnishings: as she looks at the hands, the clock joins the afternoon’s physical setting to an earlier act of concentration and aim.

An hour made into a ritual

At 6:10, the clock gives Bénédicte a measure for the afternoon’s lasting importance. She decides that from then on she will try to look at her watch every day at that hour and think of Christian, the stern ecclesiastic in the portrait, and their naked bodies, separated in the mirror. The daily recurrence she imagines turns a moment in Christian’s room into a portable recollection, carried beyond the encounter itself.

The hour of departure

Later, as Christian serves wine, Bénédicte says she does not want to go home and cannot remember ever having been so happy, except perhaps in another life. She looks at the clock and asks whether it might really be 6:10. When Christian asks when she is expected home, she explains that she should have been back long ago: on Thursdays she teaches only from eight to ten, and her children expect her home after school with a full refrigerator. That day, their mother will be absent and the refrigerator empty. Christian confirms the time, and she insists that he is telling the truth. The exact hour thus holds both the memory she wants to preserve and the ordinary family obligations her absence has interrupted.