Strasbourg is at once a practical choice and a protective fiction in Bénédicte Ombredanne’s story. She selects the city because it is close enough to make a private meeting realistic, yet far enough from her home city of Metz to reduce the chance of encountering people who know her. Although she imagines Strasbourg as the destination of an ordinary day out, her actual journey takes her to Christian’s house near Strasbourg, where the planned excursion becomes an affair and a turning point in her marriage.

Choosing a City Beyond Familiar Eyes

While creating her Meetic profile, Bénédicte considers whether to search in her own department. She has taught at a lycée in Metz for years and recognizes many people in the city and surrounding area, including parents of former students. The prospect of meeting someone where her professional and personal worlds might overlap makes her look elsewhere. She enters the postal code 67000, and the site supplies Strasbourg. Its distance is useful precisely because it is neither remote nor too close: a meeting there can seem plausible without exposing her to the familiar faces she might encounter at home.

The choice also gives the secret encounter a credible geographic frame. Christian describes living a few kilometers from Strasbourg, in an old house in a forest, and working in a large nearby building where he stores furniture for resale. Bénédicte responds to the forest as a place of enchantment. The city in her search is therefore connected to a meeting-place just beyond its limits: Strasbourg offers the recognizable destination, while the wooded house supplies the private setting she is drawn toward.

The Journey and the Meeting

On March 9, Bénédicte follows Christian’s clear directions and reaches his home at about 12:45. The approach is not described as arrival in Strasbourg itself: she walks along a stony path toward the house of the man she knows as an archer. The distinction matters. Strasbourg is the destination she has chosen and can name, but the decisive encounter takes place outside the city, in the forest-side home she has arranged to visit.

The day’s brightness enlarges her sense of what the meeting might mean. Though it is only March 9, she experiences the landscape as if spring has gathered around her and the present moment opens into a much longer span of promise. The narration presents that feeling as anticipation rather than proof that the relationship will last; Bénédicte herself wonders whether the meeting will begin something enduring. In this way, the journey from the city she selected to the house she is approaching becomes a passage between a plausible cover story and the imagined future invested in the encounter.

A Destination Recast as an Alibi

On the return drive, the geography acquires a different emotional weight. Bénédicte is traveling for the first time on the southern section of the A4 between Strasbourg and her home city of Metz. She thinks of the northern section, which she regularly uses to visit her parents in Champagne, and of the succession of historical names displayed along that route: Verdun, the Douaumont Ossuary, the Sacred Way, the Battle of Valmy, the Marne taxis, the Flight to Varennes, and Gravelotte 1870. Their accumulation leads the narration to consider how lives, like regions, bear a succession of injuries and conflicts while the landscape continues around them. The thought of passing such a memorial sign on the return journey would have offered Bénédicte a form of solace, allowing her to set her private danger beside a broader history of suffering and endurance.

At home, Strasbourg becomes the basis for the account Jean-François interrogates. He repeatedly reconstructs her claimed itinerary as a day spent in the city: shopping, lunch, reading, and time to think. He tests that explanation against what she wore and against her account of wanting to feel noticed and restored in her self-esteem. His questioning turns an ordinary destination into an instrument of control. The city is no longer simply a place Bénédicte chose to keep her meeting at a manageable distance; it is the scene of an alibi that her husband forces her to explain over and over.

The City in Later Suspicion

Strasbourg also remains attached to the affair in later conflict. In 2009, when Jean-François discovers a hidden phone and tender messages, he asks whether they come from the Strasbourg lover of three years earlier. Bénédicte denies that the messages concern that man and identifies Éric as their recipient. The episode shows how the earlier journey persists in the marriage: Strasbourg has become a shorthand for the secret relationship and a point of reference through which Jean-François interprets new evidence.

Across these episodes, the city’s narrative importance lies less in a description of its streets than in the roles assigned to it. It begins as a carefully chosen location outside Bénédicte’s familiar social orbit; it provides the public destination behind a private visit to Christian; and it later furnishes both the cover story subjected to interrogation and the name attached to her husband’s suspicions. The movement between Strasbourg, the nearby forest house, and the road back toward Metz marks the narrowing of Bénédicte’s freedom: what she first selects as a way to act beyond surveillance is subsequently folded into the account through which she is monitored.