Bénédicte kisses Christian after hitting the bullseye

Bénédicte kisses Christian after hitting the bullseye in an archery lesson at Christian’s home. The shot becomes more than a feat of beginner’s luck: Bénédicte has made it the test that will decide whether she leaves or stays, and Christian reads its unexpected result as evidence that their meeting is meant to be. Their embrace and long, instinctive kiss mark a decisive turn from hesitation toward intimacy.

The Shot and the Choice

The moment comes during a renewed archery lesson. After the two have paused to watch a magpie, Christian brings Bénédicte’s attention back to the target: the goal, he explains, is to reach its center rather than the surrounding rings. He encourages her to imagine hunting an animal and to summon a reason powerful enough to make her shoot with purpose. As an example, he asks her to picture her children having gone five days without food and needing her to bring home meat. She takes the instruction seriously; thinking of her hungry children, she releases an arrow that reaches the target.

But the next shot carries a more intimate stake. Bénédicte has spent the afternoon caught between two possibilities: making love with Christian or leaving his house before the situation goes too far. She had expected simply to enjoy the attraction, but now recognizes that she wants Christian himself, not merely the excitement of desire. Because that attraction makes staying dangerous, she sets herself a rule: if the next arrow reaches the red, she will remain; if it does not, she will gather her belongings and go home. The target gives her a way to make a decision she cannot bring herself to settle by deliberation alone.

As she prepares, Bénédicte wonders at having encountered, on her first connection, a man so closely matched to her tastes. The possibility that fate has guided her life and brought them together enters her thoughts alongside the practical risk of remaining. She promises herself that she will hit the red and stay. Her focus narrows to the target; she raises the bow, draws the string to her face, fixes her eyes on a point surrounded by red, and releases.

A Miss That Becomes a Bullseye

At the instant she lets go, Bénédicte has a presentiment that she has missed. Christian’s excited exclamations immediately contradict that expectation: the arrow, he says, is in the bullseye, an extraordinary result for her fourth shot. The apparent success is real, but its exactness is not what she intended. Her arrow has landed about twenty centimeters from the point she aimed at. It is nevertheless deep in the center of the target, perfectly perpendicular.

The discrepancy matters because Bénédicte had made the red—not the bullseye—the condition of her staying. She is shaken by the shot’s almost supernatural quality, as if her presence in the world has suddenly become clear even though its consequences may be painful. Christian celebrates her as an exceptional beginner, takes her in his arms, and turns with her in an increasingly rhythmic embrace. She laughs and reminds him that she had predicted she would soon surpass him; he is astonished by how quickly she has improved.

Bénédicte then corrects the triumphal story of the shot: she had not been aiming for the center, and she admits that she may simply have been lucky—or unlucky, given the promise she had made to herself. Christian rejects chance and misfortune as explanations. He suggests that, beneath her conscious intention to hit the red, she may have been aiming for the center all along, for something absolute and beautiful. He takes the arrow as a sign that their meeting is right, necessary, and touched by grace. His interpretation turns the mismatch between her aim and the arrow’s landing into an argument for staying together.

From Embrace to Kiss

Bénédicte is captivated by Christian’s reading of the shot and smiles at him. She tells him that she thinks he is right; he replies with confidence that he knows he is. He kisses her, and their kiss lasts a long time. The scene’s movement from a self-imposed rule to an embrace and then a kiss makes the archery result a hinge in the encounter: what began as a test of whether she would leave becomes a shared interpretation of why she should remain.

The kiss surprises Bénédicte through its instinctive accord. Her husband has not kissed her in this way for many years. Their daily morning and evening smacks are described as routine gestures, like swiping a magnetic card to enter or leave a building; Christian’s kiss is their opposite. It is at once hungry, tender, sensual, serious, melancholy, and ambitious. Birdsong reaches Bénédicte, and a little wind brushes her face as the kiss becomes, in the narration’s image, a thought moving toward its own successful conclusion.

The Encounter’s Turning Point

Bénédicte is the one who eventually ends the kiss. She looks at Christian with a luminous, contemplative smile that she cannot control, and the narration describes her as no longer mastering her thoughts, expression, imagination, or body. Her physical response—vertigo, cramps, palpitations, and sensations moving through her muscles—extends the change beyond a decision she has made consciously. The kiss has become an embodied experience of the force that had already made staying seem perilous and desirable at once.

The scene closes not with a settled account of what will follow, but with Christian asking whether they should go back into the house or go into the forest. That choice leaves the encounter poised between retreat and further intimacy. The bullseye has supplied Bénédicte with the permission, or apparent sign, she had demanded of herself; the kiss gives that sign a bodily consequence. The event’s significance lies in this convergence of decision, chance, interpretation, and desire, while the contrast with her marriage’s mechanical routine shows just how sharply this moment breaks from the intimacy she has known there.