Condé-sur-Marne

Condé-sur-Marne is the rural setting of the sisters’ family farm and childhood, a place shaped by work, kinship, and recurring visits from a Parisian family. It also becomes the site of Bénédicte’s retreat after her first marriage collapses: she returns to the village and shuts herself in her room for three months.

The family farm and its household

Bénédicte and Marie-Claire’s parents owned a large agricultural operation at Condé-sur-Marne, which their cousin later managed. Their father was regarded across the region as a skilled farmer; he was politically left-wing, communist, and anticlerical. Their mother was a practicing Catholic whose faith took practical form in helping local people: she drove them to doctors and assisted with difficult administrative matters, including trips to Reims. Marie-Claire describes her as generous and attentive to others, a model of selflessness that she also recognized in Bénédicte.

The farm’s future succession was treated in the family as settled. Their cousin, who had been raised alongside the children as a son of the household, was expected to take over after their father retired. The decision was formally announced at a family gathering on a Sunday in July, with the handover planned for five years later.

A landscape of childhood visits

The farm was also a meeting place for the sisters and the two sons of a Parisian family. Their parents-in-law had bought a country house in Condé-sur-Marne, only two hundred metres from the farm, and the family came most weekends. The boys would hurry to the farm, where the children played together, walked through the countryside and along the canal, fought with apples, played hide-and-seek, fed the poultry, and visited newborn calves.

Within this group, Bénédicte and Damien were the central pair, already in love; Marie-Claire and Jean-François had only the more incidental connection of children thrown together on weekend visits. Marie-Claire remembers Jean-François as an awkward, timid tagalong, often made the object of the girls’ teasing. The place thus holds both the warmth of shared childhood and the early social arrangement that distinguished the sisters’ closeness to Damien from Jean-François’s peripheral position.

Return after the marriage ends

In 1992, the succession announcement preceded the end of Bénédicte’s first marriage. Olivier left the family home in August, a week after Bénédicte passed her competitive examination, and requested a divorce the following month; they divorced in December. The account places the family’s decision about the farm immediately before this rupture, though it does not establish that the succession announcement alone caused it.

After the separation, Bénédicte returned to Condé-sur-Marne and shut herself in her room for three months. For Marie-Claire, the change was lasting: the Bénédicte who emerged was no longer as spontaneous or intrepid as the sister she had known before the depression. The village is therefore not merely a childhood backdrop. It is also the family place to which Bénédicte comes back when the life she had expected has broken apart, and the setting of her first prolonged withdrawal.