C’est environné du réel le plus aride que se déploie le merveilleux

C’est environné du réel le plus aride que se déploie le merveilleux is the principle Bénédicte Ombredanne draws from literature to describe her hope that an extraordinary opening might appear inside an otherwise depleted everyday life. At her first meeting with Éric Reinhardt, she turns the contrast between aridity and wonder into a way of looking at the ordinary: not as a surface that has nothing left to offer, but as something that might conceal a passage elsewhere.

Meaning and Image

The expression, which Bénédicte uses to conclude a long conversation about her life, gives wonder a paradoxical setting. It does not arrive after the arid real has been left behind; it unfolds while surrounded by it. This makes the ordinary both the condition that constrains her and the place in which an opening might be found.

Bénédicte develops that image through a story by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, in which the marvelous lies hidden in rock beneath a traveler’s feet. She wonders whether a similarly secret possibility could be concealed in an old floor, and extends the image to the worn surface of daily life: perhaps a hidden trapdoor, the beginning of a staircase, or the darkness of an unknown space could be detected there. Her emphasis falls on looking closely enough to perceive a passage, rather than dismissing the familiar as exhausted.

The Everyday as a Possible Passage

For Bénédicte, recognizing such an opening also means confronting the reasons one might refuse it. She lists the familiar injunctions to defer, to decide that an action is improper or too risky, and to imagine what children, colleagues, friends, or family might think if they found out. The passage is therefore not merely a hidden feature of the ordinary; seeing it entails facing the social judgments that make disappearance or escape seem unthinkable.

The expression follows her account of renewed hopes for happiness. Bénédicte says that she has begun to believe again, partly through Reinhardt’s novel, in the possibility of a sudden, intense interruption that might carry her away from everything, even briefly. The marvelous need not take the form of a person who rescues her: she also imagines it as a charming incident, a romanesque instant, or a sudden clearing full of hope. The expression gives that longing a frame without promising that reality will satisfy it; she acknowledges that life is ungenerous to those who ask to be enchanted.

Literary and Narrative Context

Bénédicte presents the idea as something shared by Reinhardt’s novel and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s story, despite their markedly different lengths: six hundred pages and roughly half a dozen. Her comparison makes the expression a point of contact between the book she has read and the life she is describing. Literature supplies an image through which she can articulate a possibility she struggles to locate in daily experience.

The expression also marks the close of the extended personal disclosure at their first meeting. Rather than offering a general maxim detached from the scene, it gathers Bénédicte’s reflections on rare pleasures, revived hopes, and the difficulty of finding an opening amid constraint. Its decisive tension is that the barren real remains present even as she imagines the marvelous emerging within it.