Aurélie is stalked and harassed

Aurélie is stalked and harassed after a brief encounter turns into a campaign of pursuit that lasts two years. Recounted to other patients at Sainte-Blandine, her story shows how a polite attempt to end an unwanted connection becomes, in the stalker’s hands, supposed evidence of love—and how his disclosure of an earlier campaign exposes the threat behind his certainty.

The encounter at Metz Plage

Before the harassment, Aurélie liked spending summer evenings alone at Metz Plage, listening to concerts from a deck chair with a drink. One evening she noticed a man watching her from nearby. She deliberately avoided meeting his gaze, as she was habitually cautious with men and did not want reserve to be mistaken for an invitation. When the concert ended, she set off home. After she had walked about a hundred metres, he ran after her and asked her to stay so that he could make her acquaintance. She declined, but he continued the conversation with precise words and polished, distinguished speech. The exchange came to seem like a chance meeting between two people of the same age, not an obviously threatening approach.

He gave her his telephone number, and a few days later she called him. He invited her to his studio the following Saturday. They talked and kissed, but his manner felt insistently intense: he looked at her with excessive devotion, as if he already regarded her as beyond comparison. They kissed and caressed, and Aurélie removed only her bra. When the evening seemed to be moving toward sex, she said she needed to go home and sleep after a long, difficult week. He asked her to stay and promised that he would not touch her, but she had no desire to remain. Though she believed he would keep that promise, she left.

A courteous refusal becomes a trap

Aurélie later went to see him to say that she wanted to end things. In retrospect, she regarded this as a serious mistake: she could have refused by telephone or simply disappeared without explanation, but her concern for other people’s feelings made her choose a direct, gentle conversation. She spent two hours trying to disentangle herself. He insisted that she would change her mind, that she loved him without yet understanding it, and that their unexpected meeting had decisive importance for both their futures. He treated her kisses as proof of deep, reciprocal feeling and imagined that time would bring her around.

Aurélie did not confront him sharply or leave by slamming the door. She stayed on the sofa, trying to find moderate, inoffensive words and to wear down his illusions without humiliating him. Her consideration for his feelings, which she understood as ordinary courtesy, gave him room to present her refusal as uncertainty rather than a decision. The episode marks the imbalance at the heart of the harassment: she was trying to end the relationship, while he claimed authority to define what her actions meant and what she would eventually feel.

Messages, surveillance, and insistence

Some time later, he wrote declarations in the dirt on her car, parked outside her home, including that he loved her and that she was the love of his life. Aurélie had not told him where she lived; her telephone number was unlisted, and he did not know her surname. She concluded that he must have followed her home from work after she had imprudently told him her profession and workplace. The messages began to appear regularly. To Aurélie, their repetition felt like a cord tightening around her, making it increasingly difficult to move freely or put the man out of her thoughts.

She telephoned him and firmly told him to leave her alone: she had made herself clear, he should look for someone else, and she would not change her mind. He answered by claiming that she loved him without knowing it. He used the fact that she had gone to his studio, kissed him, and returned there to override what she had actually told him. When she explained that she had come back only to end things more courteously, he recast the visit and her difficulty leaving as proof of a hidden attraction. In his account, her explicit refusal could not disprove the destiny he had invented for them.

The history behind his threat

When Aurélie warned that she would call the police, he said that this would be useless and that he had faced worse. He then disclosed that, years earlier in Toulouse, he had focused on a young woman, lived with her for a week, and pursued her relentlessly for five years. He had spent time in prison on three occasions—six months, then nine months, and another six months in a psychiatric hospital. Afterward, the justice system had barred him from entering the department. He had moved to Metz, where he now treated his encounter with Aurélie as an even more powerful version of what had happened before.

The revelation changes the meaning of his earlier persistence. What he had presented as an unusual romance was part of a pattern he himself described: fixating on a woman, refusing to accept her independence, and sustaining pursuit over years. He told Aurélie that he would not let her go, that providence had chosen their future, and that she would eventually live with him and bear his children. His certainty was not a response to any agreement between them; it was a claim that her future belonged to the story he had made up.

Telling the story at Sainte-Blandine

Aurélie recounts these events at a table among patients at Sainte-Blandine, in response to questions about how she had ended up in a situation of prolonged pursuit despite having left his studio that first night. As she describes the threat and the history he revealed, the conversation falls silent. The listeners’ distress becomes visible, and Bénédicte Ombredanne weeps while listening; earlier, Bénédicte had looked at Aurélie with a wish to love and protect her. The account thus makes the harassment more than a private chronology: it is a disclosure met by collective attention, as those listening recognize the terror and isolation within her story.