« Sainte-Blandine, c’est Brigadoon »

The expression « Sainte-Blandine, c’est Brigadoon » is Bénédicte Ombredanne’s name for the clinic as a place seemingly set apart from ordinary reality. It gathers together her longing for the people she met there, the possibility of becoming someone other than the woman her life had confined her to be, and the painful sense that this alternative world disappeared when she left.

The comparison and what it means

Bénédicte explains the comparison to Éric Reinhardt as they walk along the platform toward her seat on the Paris–Luxembourg train. She thanks him for giving her so much time and says that speaking with him has already helped. Until then, she had told her story only to the residents she knew during her stay at Sainte-Blandine as Bénédicte’s refuge. Asked whether she had kept in touch with them, she admits that she had not, despite their having left her their telephone numbers and addresses.

Her account makes the clinic feel less like a location she can revisit than a temporary country whose inhabitants belong to it. In her imagination, the residents remained there after she departed, as if they had no existence outside the clinic and had appeared in the wider world only for the duration of her stay. She longs to return, find them all again, and have ordinary reality recede for a hundred years, so that she might continue her life with them in safety.

A possible self, and a community

The comparison is not simply a claim that Bénédicte fell in love at the clinic. She qualifies that idea: if she fell in love, it was with a possible image of herself, and with the prospect of existing in an enlarged reality. She also describes an attachment to every person she met there, and to the unusual bond of friendship and trust among them. The refuge is therefore both inward and shared: it holds an imagined self as well as a community in which she felt connected to others.

Her failure to contact the former residents after leaving sharpens the separation between that community and her life beyond the clinic. She had their details, but did not turn those possible links into continuing relationships. In her memory, the people and the place remained joined; returning to one meant returning to the other, while departure left them seeming to vanish together.

The reality outside the refuge

The longing for a separate, protected world stands against Bénédicte’s account of life with Jean-François. She says that she has no mobile phone because he fears she might use one to acquire friends or lovers. He has her teaching schedule and can call the landline to check that she is home when expected. Although she insists that she is not captive and can go out for errands, she describes being followed closely and monitored throughout the day.

After her afternoon with Christian, surveillance gives way to prolonged questioning and accusation. Jean-François calls repeatedly, sometimes wakes her at night, and returns to interrogating her about what happened. Even when a period of calm seems to have ended the ordeal, his suspicions revive within a day or two; the questioning becomes a recurring condition of their life together. Against this pattern, her description of the clinic as a separate country evokes not just a fond memory but a brief experience of connection and a different possible self beyond the constant pressure of home.

The refuge’s limits

The comparison does not imply that Bénédicte could remain outside ordinary life. In March 2009, she calls Éric after Jean-François discovers her secret phone, hidden behind Mallarmé’s collected works in her office library. The messages on it are tender but not explicit. To deflect suspicion from the man she has recently met, she tells her husband that the messages are from Éric; Jean-François has found the phone and has pushed her against a wall during his rage. The episode shows how little protection the imagined refuge provides once her private communications are exposed.

The contrast returns in the account of her later illness. During a week-long walking holiday, Jean-François dismisses her pain and fatigue as exaggerated and insists that she continue; even after a doctor prescribes painkillers, he maintains that her symptoms are psychological. A subsequent hospital examination reveals widespread cancer. During treatment, he controls her prescriptions and prepares her medication, while Marie-Claire urges her to take responsibility for it herself rather than become wholly dependent on him. When chemotherapy leaves Bénédicte gravely unwell and she asks to go to hospital, Jean-François refuses; Marie-Claire’s arrival makes it possible for her to receive urgent care. The clinic’s remembered world of friendship and trust thus remains a sharply bounded alternative to the coercion and vulnerability of her life outside it. The expression preserves the force of that temporary refuge precisely because it could not become a permanent escape.