The Palais-Royal gardens are associated with Bénédicte Ombredanne and Éric Reinhardt’s two meetings in Paris: both took place on the terrace of Le Nemours café near the gardens’ entrance. The gardens also appear among the cultural references through which the pair recognized a sense of imaginative kinship.

Setting and Meetings

The meetings were not described as taking place inside the gardens themselves, but at Le Nemours café near the Palais-Royal, on its terrace. The café’s position at the gardens’ entrance makes the setting a threshold between an ordinary public meeting place and the gardens that belonged to the pair’s shared imaginative vocabulary.

Their first appointment took place in March 2008. Both were intimidated, and Éric Reinhardt did most of the talking while Bénédicte asked him questions about writing his novels. They met again a few months later, on a Sunday in September. This second conversation lasted four hours, as Bénédicte confided her life to him and he encouraged her to continue.

A Shared Reference

During their spring conversation, Bénédicte told Éric Reinhardt that reading his novel had brought a growing number of points of connection into view. The Palais-Royal was one of the references in that expanding constellation, alongside literature, theatre, dance, and ideas such as ecstasy and the absolute. The gardens thus function not only as the vicinity of their meetings but also as part of the cultural landscape through which the two understood their affinity.

Narrative Significance

The location joins the physical circumstances of the encounters to the inward intensity of their conversation. At the terrace of Le Nemours café near the Palais-Royal gardens, an initially hesitant literary meeting became, at the second appointment, the setting for Bénédicte’s extended personal disclosure. The contrast between the recognizable Paris café and the imaginative world the pair associated with the Palais-Royal gives the place a quiet double role: a concrete meeting point and a marker of their shared imaginative life.