The meeting and departure in March 2006

The meeting and departure in March 2006 is the turning point at which Bénédicte Ombredanne moves from years of self-denial toward a life she has chosen for herself. It begins not with certainty about a new romance but with an unexpected discovery at home, an eruption of long-contained anger, and the decision to leave her familiar routine long enough to see what else might be possible. The day’s promise of freedom is real, but so are the consequences: Jean-François responds to her absence with a pattern of suspicion and interrogation that follows her back into ordinary life.

The silence at home and the decision to leave

One evening in March, Bénédicte returns late from a meeting. A physics teacher’s birthday champagne had helped prolong it. From the street, she sees that none of the windows of her house is lit. Inside, the rooms are dark and quiet, unlike the noisy domestic evenings she expects. She calls for Lola, Arthur, and Jean-François, but receives no answer. Her alarm becomes panic as she checks the empty living room and kitchen, then runs upstairs. She finds her children together beneath a duvet, among their stuffed toys. Their affectionate greeting reassures her that they are safe, at least apparently.

After leaving their room, Bénédicte tells the children to go to bed, persuading them with the promise of a longer breakfast together the next morning. She eats quickly in the kitchen and then shuts herself in her ground-floor office. During that short meal, a decision takes shape: until then, even the idea of visiting a dating site had not entered her mind, including in her most private fantasies. The change is not presented as a carefully planned escape. It follows what she experiences as an explosion, intensified by ten years of holding back desire, gaiety, hopes, ambition, tenderness, anger, and revolt. Her sudden action is bound to a wider reckoning with the years she feels she has spent giving things up.

Making a profile and choosing a possibility

Bénédicte opens her computer and registers on the Meetic dating site. The process is cumbersome, with page after page to complete and a validation procedure that seems interminable, but she proceeds methodically. Her determination recalls the period when she prepared for and passed the agrégation: she once felt especially radiant in the effort of a competitive examination, alone with her work and measuring herself against others through knowledge and individual performance. Making a profile becomes another demanding act of self-definition. She selects answers carefully, uses euphemism or makes small adjustments where she thinks they will help, and leaves the most delicate questions unanswered so as not to undermine her chances.

She enters the site under the name Fionarose@Playmobil677 and begins corresponding with Christian. In a message arranging their meeting, she tells him that joining the site in anger had left her unsure what she was seeking, but that she now believes it was him. Her words express the speed with which an impulsive act acquires a particular object: the site that had seemed an unforeseen destination becomes a route toward one person. The exchange also sets a date. Christian welcomes her to arrive early, and she plans to come for part of the day rather than make an open-ended commitment.

March 9: a departure with room to turn back

On Thursday, March 9, Bénédicte has classes from eight until ten in the morning. Her established Thursday routine is to go shopping at Carrefour after leaving school; she has followed it since the beginning of the year except when illness, training, or heavy snow intervened. For this meeting, however, she decides that the hypermarket would pull her back into the identity of a mother managing household needs. She mentally dims the family, the children, the unfinished domestic work, and her husband, concentrating instead on her desire as a woman. She plans to shop after returning, no later than four o’clock, and expects to be back in Metz by three. She imagines that she may simply have coffee with Christian and then leave.

This possibility of turning back helps her make the journey. She tells herself that she is going to see, not to commit herself: the trip can remain a movement she initiates, an interruption of the still life of her existence, and she can decide whether anything more will happen than an archery session. Her uncertainty matters. The departure is a deliberate break with routine, but not yet a declared decision to abandon her family or establish a new life.

The directions Christian has given her are clear, and she arrives at his house near Strasbourg at about a quarter to one. The weather is exceptionally bright. As she walks along a stone path toward the house, the landscape seems to enlarge the present into a much more expansive stretch of time, as if this day carried the promise of other radiant days to come. The early date—March 9—makes the spring atmosphere feel especially striking to her. Although she usually prefers and venerates autumn, she is receptive to the season’s promise of renewal. The meeting feels new and unpractised, a possible rebirth. She hopes that Christian will appeal to her and that she will appeal to him, and experiences a happiness more intense than any she can recall from the preceding months or years.

A brief escape under watch

The journey also exposes how little room Bénédicte ordinarily has to move without being monitored. She explains to Christian that she has no mobile phone because Jean-François fears she might use one to have an expansive social life, including friends or lovers. He requires her to be reachable on the landline, has her timetable, and knows when he can call her. She is not literally prevented from going out to run errands, she says, but he follows her movements closely. On this day she has chosen to disappear from his awareness for several hours, and she expects to face consequences when she returns, hoping only that they will be bearable and limited.

The phrase of disappearance describes the day’s central risk: she is not simply making a romantic excursion but stepping outside a system in which her whereabouts are routinely known. On the highway she manages to put a difficult conversation behind her, and the journey carries her from the familiar schedule of school and shopping toward the possibility she has chosen. Yet her expectation that she can contain the excursion—to a few hours, a meeting, perhaps archery—will prove sharply different from what follows.

The return and the ordeal that follows

After Bénédicte comes home, Jean-François’s response becomes a sustained campaign of questioning. He calls her repeatedly during the day and increasingly wakes her at night. He confronts her in the morning after only a few hours of imperfect sleep, and approaches her even while she is showering. When the children are absent, his accusations and questions can continue for hours. The narration compares their repetition to a dense, inescapable forest: the image makes the return from her brief departure feel less like a return to safety than entry into a confined space with no visible way out.

The interrogation also becomes recurrent rather than a single confrontation. At times Bénédicte believes that her admissions have brought the ordeal to an end and that the suffering triggered by the six hours she spent away is finally over. But a day or two later, Jean-François’s suspicions return. He wakes her during the night, says he cannot sleep, and asks her to recount the encounter again, insisting that hearing the details will relieve his distress. She resists repeating what she has already told him. The exchange reverses the initial promise of the day: the short interval she had set aside for herself becomes material for an extended process in which her husband demands access to her memories and explanations.

The pattern of control persists beyond the first aftermath. In March 2009, when Bénédicte asks Éric to suspend their correspondence, she explains that Jean-François has discovered a second phone hidden in her office library, behind the collected works of Mallarmé. A quiet message alert leads him to the device and to tender messages from another man. He pushes her against a wall while taking the phone, and she tells Éric that it is the first time Jean-François has physically assaulted her. The later episode does not erase the significance of March 2006; it shows how the earlier departure remains entangled with secrecy, surveillance, and the danger attached to private communication.

Significance of the date

March 2006 holds two opposed movements together. Bénédicte’s registration on Meetic and her trip to meet Christian give form to a desire that she had kept outside her conscious plans; the bright day and her sense of an enlarged future make that opening feel briefly immense. At the same time, she undertakes the journey from within a marriage where her timetable and movements are closely tracked, and the return exposes the cost of acting beyond that arrangement. Her departure is therefore neither a simple romantic escape nor a completed liberation. It is the first clear interruption of a life organized around self-restraint, and the beginning of consequences that make that interruption increasingly difficult to sustain.