Christian

Christian is a furniture dealer near Strasbourg whose encounter with Bénédicte Ombredanne gives her a glimpse of freedom and passionate love within a life governed by her husband's control. Their connection moves rapidly from an online exchange to an intimate afternoon together, then survives in memory and writing after Bénédicte asks Christian to leave her alone. When she returns to him twenty-two months later, their story is not resolved by a reported reunion or promise: it closes at the threshold of a kiss.

Identity and Introduction

Christian first appears online under the username Playmobil677, chatting with Bénédicte, who uses the name Fionarose. He gives her his real first name after she has flirted with him as a stranger. He is the only man on the site to ask what she is really called, a small act of attention that Bénédicte turns into a personal gift: she allows him to call her Fiona. Their early exchange therefore establishes a contrast between the sexual performance of an anonymous profile and the wish to be addressed as a particular person.

He lives in a large old house in a forest a few kilometers from Strasbourg. He also works from a large building where he stores furniture for resale; he says he has no shop. The practical, self-employed furniture dealer is introduced alongside Bénédicte's enchanted response to the idea of a house among trees. For her, the forest already carries the promise of a fairy tale, an imaginative register that will shape her understanding of their meeting.

The First Meeting and the Bow

When Bénédicte arrives at Christian's home, she rings the bell while privately preparing herself for disappointment. Christian appears behind her rather than answering from inside. He is of medium height and solid build, with short brown hair; he is wearing gardening gloves and carrying pruning shears, which he puts down in the grass before approaching her. His face differs considerably from the photograph, but she finds him more attractive in person. Their awkward greeting gives way to a kiss on the cheeks, and his deep dimples and cheerful manner make her feel welcomed rather than inspected.

That welcome matters to Bénédicte. She notices that Christian does not seem to appraise her body or measure her sexual desirability. By contrast, she scrutinizes his physical details and repeatedly reaches the same conclusion: she likes him intensely. The difference between his easy cordiality and her deliberate self-observation marks the beginning of an attraction that is both bodily and reflective. She is not simply swept along; she watches herself being swept along.

At the archery target, a shot that misses the precise point Bénédicte intended lands in the center of the bull's-eye. Christian takes her in his arms, delighted by the result and by the speed of her progress as a beginner. Bénédicte calls the shot bad luck because she meant to hit the red, not the center. Christian rejects chance as an explanation. He interprets the arrow as evidence that, beneath her conscious intention, she aimed at the target's heart—and that their encounter has its own necessity. His reading turns a mistake into an omen, giving their attraction the scale of something miraculous.

The embrace lasts as they speak face to face, and Christian kisses her. The kiss astonishes Bénédicte because her husband has not kissed her passionately for many years; their routine pecks have become merely functional. With Christian, the kiss feels at once tender, hungry, serious, and full of possibility. The scene establishes the affair's defining contrast: a long-starved intimacy suddenly experienced as a complete, meaningful event.

Love, Freedom, and Unequal Circumstances

Bénédicte tells Christian that meeting him was a way to prove she could escape her husband's hold and make a decision for herself, secretly, as a free woman. She insists that she has not surrendered and remains the person directing her own life, despite appearances and despite the claims of her husband, children, school, and social expectations. Christian asks whether her husband treats her badly, but she resists discussing it. Her declaration makes clear that the afternoon is not only a romance; it is also an assertion of agency against the domestic life that confines her.

Christian learns that Bénédicte has no mobile phone. Her husband fears she might use one to have an expansive social life, with friends or lovers; instead, he requires her to be reachable on the landline, knows her teaching schedule, and expects her to return home after classes. Bénédicte says she is not literally captive and can go out on errands, yet also describes being tracked and permanently locatable. Her visit to Christian has taken her off her husband's radar for several hours, and she knows she will have to face the consequences. Christian's concern that her husband may react aggressively shows that the risk does not end when she leaves his house.

Their conversation also exposes the different ways they imagine time and commitment. Bénédicte describes feeling responsible for time's passage, as though greater attention to the present might have kept her and her friends younger. Christian says he has never experienced that sensation, but calls it beautiful and tells her she is rare and wonderful. He then says that he wants her to become his wife. Bénédicte dismisses him as foolish, while he insists that he is serious. The proposal arrives with striking speed, making explicit the romance's movement from sudden recognition toward an imagined shared life.

The Letter and the Break

The day after Bénédicte leaves, Christian writes to ask whether she is well and whether her husband was too aggressive when she returned. He says that he has thought of little besides her and urges her to meet him again. He acknowledges that she is married and has two children, but argues that these facts need not prevent him from offering her his love. He also tells her that he has two children, who visit every other weekend and for half the holidays, and that he believes he could give her children sincere affection. His vision is not limited to a secret affair: he imagines the possibility of a shared family and treats his immediate certainty about Bénédicte as a reliable guide.

For Bénédicte, the letter is her first love letter, received at thirty-six. She rereads it many times, learning substantial passages by heart, but then deletes it. She fears her husband will search her desk and computer for evidence—a fear borne out when he later ransacks her belongings—so she leaves no copy hidden among her books or papers. The loss of the message becomes part of the cost of preserving the relationship as a secret: what she wants to keep must also be destroyed to remain undiscovered.

Her reply thanks Christian for the beautiful letter and says that their afternoon was among the happiest experiences of her life. Yet she tells him that she sees no future for their relationship and asks him not to contact her again, so that the memory of the day can remain intact. Writing this answer feels to her like acting violently against herself and stripping her life of wonderful possibilities. Christian's declaration of love and Bénédicte's refusal thus express opposing responses to the same certainty: he presses toward a life together, while she attempts to preserve the encounter by ending it.

Memory, Return, and Narrative Significance

After leaving Sainte-Blandine, Bénédicte imagines that she might call Christian, visit him, live with him, and perhaps have children with him. These are hopes formed during her hospital stay, not evidence that the couple made or fulfilled such plans. Her optimism collapses when she returns to the same marriage and describes herself as shut in a cave of sadness. Later, reading Éric Reinhardt's novel gives her a new measure of light and helps her believe again in the possibility of happiness. Christian remains part of the future she once imagined, but the evidence of that renewed hope belongs to Bénédicte's account, not to an action by Christian.

Writing also preserves and reshapes their intimacy. In a scene she writes, Bénédicte places her right hand beside Christian's temple, bringing the eye on her ring close to the eye of her lover. The image makes the remembered beloved a presence within her private imaginative world; it does not establish that the gesture occurred in their original meeting. Her written and spoken recollections keep alive a relationship that had been cut short in ordinary life.

After twenty-two months apart, Bénédicte returns to Christian without warning, as she had imagined doing in her dreams. She recalls having thought about that return throughout the separation, and says that the possibility helped her. Christian receives her and asks after her. At the novel's close, Bénédicte tells him that she believes the time has come for them to kiss. The ending offers neither a narrated kiss nor a settled future; it leaves their reunion poised at the act that began their love. Christian's role is therefore both intimate and structural: he embodies a brief experience of affection and freedom, while the separation and return preserve the difference between the life Bénédicte longs for and the life she has been able to live.