Bénédicte's arrow that struck the bull's-eye

Bénédicte's arrow that struck the bull's-eye is the missed shot that lands, instead, in the heart of the target—and changes the meaning of Bénédicte Ombredanne’s afternoon with Christian. It gives material form to a choice she has set up as a test: if the arrow reaches the red, she will stay; if it does not, she will gather her things and go home. The shot fulfills that condition in an unexpected way, allowing Christian to treat its apparent accident as proof of a deeper intention.

The Shot and Its Target

Christian has already coached Bénédicte to stop shooting without a clear purpose. To make the lesson concrete, he asks her to imagine that her children have gone five days without food and that she must bring home meat. Bénédicte draws the string to her lips, thinks of her hungry children, and sends an arrow into the target. The later, decisive shot follows a more private instruction: she is to imagine something still more vital.

As she takes the next arrow, Bénédicte is caught between two possible actions. She wants Christian, not merely the sensual excitement she had expected to enjoy, but him in particular; at the same time, she knows that staying at his house would be dangerous. She has spent the past two hours turning over whether to make love with him or escape before it is too late. Even the coincidence of having found a man so much to her taste on her first connection feels, to her, as if it might carry a meaning beyond chance.

A Promise Made to the Arrow

Bénédicte gives the shot a rule that will spare her from making the decision directly. If she hits the red, she will stay; otherwise she will leave. She makes herself promise to put the arrow in the red, then raises the bow, fixes her eyes on a point within that color, draws the string toward her face, and releases. In the instant of release, she has a premonition that she has missed.

The arrow confirms the miss in one sense and overturns it in another. It lands about twenty centimeters from the point Bénédicte meant to hit, but embeds itself in the heart of the target, perfectly perpendicular. Christian’s excited cries follow almost immediately. He celebrates the bull’s-eye as an astonishing achievement for a beginner on her fourth arrow, while Bénédicte is shaken by the result: she had aimed somewhere else, yet the arrow has reached the target’s center.

Christian’s Reading of the Arrow

Christian takes the arrow’s landing as more than a lucky shot. When Bénédicte admits that she was aiming for the red and calls the result luck—or misfortune, since it did not land where she intended—he rejects both explanations. In his account, archery has no such accidents: perhaps, he proposes, her unconscious aimed for the heart of the target while her conscious mind fixed on the red. The discrepancy between her stated aim and the arrow’s destination becomes, for him, evidence that a deeper part of her wanted the absolute and the ultimate beauty.

He extends that interpretation from the target to their relationship. The arrow, he argues, shows that their meeting is right, carried by grace and necessity, whether Bénédicte wills it or not. His words turn a physical result into a claim about destiny. The arrow itself proves only where it landed; the larger meaning belongs to Christian’s interpretation. Yet Bénédicte is captivated by what he says, smiles, and tells him she thinks he is right. Christian answers with confidence, treating her assent as recognition of what he already believes.

The Arrow as a Turning Point

The shot resolves the immediate test without resolving the danger Bénédicte knows she is taking. Its landing satisfies the condition she set for herself, but not in the simple way she intended: she misses her chosen point and nevertheless hits the bull’s-eye. That distinction lets her experience the decision as something the arrow has made for her, even though she devised the test and promised herself to follow its result.

The object’s force lies in this double status. It is an ordinary arrow, released by a novice and embedded in a target; it is also the hinge on which the scene’s value turns, from indecision and attempted self-protection toward the possibility of staying with Christian. The precise miss keeps the moment from being straightforward proof of skill, while the bull’s-eye supplies the spectacle through which Christian can make it signify fate. Bénédicte’s astonishment and his embrace bind that interpretation to the body as well as to speech. The arrow thus becomes a shared emblem of the encounter: for Christian, a sign of necessity; for Bénédicte, a result that seems to make her presence in the world suddenly intelligible, even as she senses that its consequences may be painful.