La reddition (« surrender »)

La reddition (« surrender ») brings together a word Bénédicte Ombredanne once loved, her collapse after Olivier leaves her, and the unequal marriage that begins during that period of vulnerability. It is not simply a name for passivity: the novel sets Bénédicte’s declared abandonment of hope against the coercive conditions that repeatedly narrow her choices, and against her later efforts to reclaim responsibility for her own life.

The word and the song

Bénédicte tells her twin sister, Marie-Claire Ombredanne, that she has always adored the word surrender, which she heard in a famous song. She now understands the obscure attachment: the word’s beauty, and the related French word reddition, have become names for what she believes she must do. The reference is to Dire Straits’ song, whose opening words are Sweet surrender. The phrase therefore carries a history before Bénédicte applies it to her own circumstances; it has been part of the sisters’ lives since adolescence, when the song often played on the radio.

When Bénédicte says that the time has come to surrender, she explains that happiness did not choose her, despite her efforts to deserve it, and that she has decided to give up. The statement marks a reversal in her beliefs about reality. She had trusted that a person who did not lie to herself or make concessions would not be disappointed by life, and that reality might even fulfil her deepest wishes. After Olivier’s departure, a six-month depression brings that faith to an end. Surrender names not a considered philosophical conclusion but the moment when the promise she had relied on no longer seems credible to her.

Depression and the beginning of a marriage

Marie-Claire does not accept her sister’s pronouncement as final. She argues with Bénédicte and succeeds in getting her to take back what she has said. The exchange establishes both the gravity of the declaration and its instability: Bénédicte voices a decision to abandon hope, but her sister’s intervention interrupts it. The later history of the word is shadowed by what neither sister can undo. In April 1993, Marie-Claire surprises Bénédicte and Jean-François kissing at their parents’ house. She later regrets not using the moment to ask Bénédicte what the kiss meant or to warn her against entering a relationship while so fragile after Olivier.

The novel links the formation of Bénédicte and Jean-François’s couple to that vulnerability. Before the depression, Bénédicte had long seen him as a childhood friend and family figure, not as a sexual partner; she had, in Marie-Claire’s account, been his superior in intelligence, culture, eloquence, and presence. During her collapse, however, Jean-François sees her as someone within his reach and moves to take her in. The marriage that follows is described as arising from those circumstances, rather than from a stable match between the two. Bénédicte spends the next thirteen years trying to free herself from the relationship. In this history, surrender is connected to the conditions in which she enters the marriage, but it does not establish that she freely or permanently accepts what the marriage becomes.

From declared surrender to constrained choices

The later account makes the idea concrete through the restrictions surrounding Bénédicte’s ordinary movements. She explains to Christian that she has no mobile phone because her husband fears she might use one to build a social life. Jean-François has her schedule, expects her to come home after classes, and can reach her on the landline. Bénédicte says she is not captive and can go out to run errands, yet also recognizes that he tracks where she is. On the day she meets Christian, she has chosen to disappear from his view for several hours and anticipates having to bear the consequences. Her description holds two truths together: she retains some freedom of movement, but that freedom exists inside continuous monitoring.

After the meeting, monitoring becomes relentless questioning and harassment. Jean-François phones repeatedly, wakes her at night, and confronts her at home, including in the shower. His questioning returns to the details of her afternoon with Christian and continues for hours when the children are absent. At night he asks her to recount the encounter again, presenting her account as something he needs in order to relieve his own distress. The repetition turns the past into a means of control in the present. It also gives surrender a grimly different sense: Bénédicte is pressed to yield privacy, sleep, and the right to stop retelling an event she has already described.

Dependence, resistance, and the concept’s limits

In March 2009, Bénédicte calls Éric Reinhardt to warn him that they must suspend contact. Jean-François has discovered her second phone, hidden behind the collected works of Mallarmé in her office library, after its quiet message alert sounds. He finds tender messages and reacts with rage; Bénédicte tells Éric that Jean-François has pushed her against a wall and that her forehead is bleeding. She says she identified Éric as the correspondent to divert suspicion from the man she had recently met. The episode shows how secrecy, discovery, and the effort to protect another person unfold under her husband’s scrutiny. It also prevents the word surrender from being mistaken for an uncomplicated inner choice: her actions take place within a relationship marked by surveillance and physical violence.

During her cancer treatment, dependence takes another form. Jean-François keeps the prescriptions and prepares Bénédicte’s medicines on a tray with a glass of water, waiting until she has taken them before leaving for work. Marie-Claire objects that this arrangement makes Bénédicte reliant on him and urges her to take charge of her own medication, body, illness, and decisions. This intervention recasts autonomy as practical action, not merely a declaration of will. Across the novel, then, surrender is a charged and unstable concept: it begins as Bénédicte’s name for the collapse of a belief in happiness, resonates with the circumstances of her marriage, and returns against repeated forms of imposed dependence. Her sister’s efforts to interrupt that dependence reveal the distance between saying that one gives up and having the power to choose freely.