Sweet surrender · Reddition

Sweet surrender / Reddition is both a remembered lyric and a name Bénédicte gives to surrendering her hope of happiness. The phrase gathers private musical memory into a pivotal moment of despair, and acquires a darker resonance from the vulnerable circumstances in which her relationship with Jean-François takes shape.

Song and Memory

The phrase comes from the opening words of a Dire Straits song that was often played on the radio when Bénédicte and her twin sister, Marie-Claire, were adolescents. Bénédicte had always been especially attached to the word surrender, though she says that only later did she understand the reason for that attachment. The song therefore links the language of her later crisis to an earlier, shared period of life.

Bénédicte’s Declaration

During the depression that followed Olivier’s departure, Bénédicte tells Marie-Claire that the time has come for her to surrender. She frames the decision as the end of a bargain with reality: she had done everything she could to merit happiness, but happiness had not chosen her, so she would abandon the effort. The word’s beauty matters to her even as its meaning becomes bleak; she dwells on its sound while describing a decision to relinquish hope.

Marie-Claire rejects the declaration and tells her twin to stop lamenting and pull herself together. She later succeeds in getting Bénédicte to withdraw what she has said. Yet the exchange exposes how thoroughly Bénédicte’s faith in deserving happiness has been shaken: the surrender is not simply a passing turn of phrase but a way of describing the collapse of the outlook on which she had relied.

Resonance in the Story

The phrase also stands beside the beginning of Bénédicte’s relationship with Jean-François. In the aftermath of her depression, he sees her as newly within his reach; she had previously surpassed him in intellect, appearance, culture, eloquence, intensity, and intelligence, and regarded him as a childhood friend rather than as a sexual partner. Their union forms under conditions of extreme vulnerability, and Bénédicte spends the following thirteen years trying to escape it. Against that history, surrender carries an irony: the word first gives shape to her renunciation of happiness, while the relationship formed in her weakened state becomes another constraint from which she struggles to free herself.