March 2008

March 2008 is the date of Bénédicte Ombredanne’s first face-to-face meeting with Éric Reinhardt, a turning point in their correspondence and the beginning of a relationship in which she would gradually entrust him with her story. The meeting took place at the terrace of Le Nemours café near the Palais-Royal gardens. Its quiet, uncertain beginning contrasts with the much fuller confidence of their second meeting, several months later.

Place in the chronology

The two meetings between Bénédicte and Éric took place at Le Nemours: the first in March 2008, the second on a Sunday in September. The March encounter was not yet the sustained personal disclosure that followed. Both were intimidated, and Éric did most of the talking while Bénédicte asked questions about how he wrote his novels. The date therefore marks an initial meeting shaped more by her attention to his work than by any explanation of her private circumstances.

The encounter at Le Nemours

Éric arrived early, but Bénédicte was already on the crowded terrace. He walked its central aisle twice, searching for a free table and for the reader from Lorraine he expected to meet, yet failed to recognize her. Seated across the aisle and partly screened by a pillar, she watched him and offered only a restrained, attentive smile. He first looked toward two other women who seemed to be waiting for someone; only after returning toward the entrance did he notice Bénédicte’s face. The delay made the act of recognition part of the encounter: she did not call out or make an obvious gesture, and he later understood that her unobtrusive appearance had helped him overlook her.

Their differing manner at this first meeting set its tone. Bénédicte was reserved, while Éric tried to draw her into speaking about herself and asked about the story by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam that she loved. She described the possibility that wonder might be hidden beneath the worn surface of everyday life, and connected that idea to the novels she had read. Her account introduced a way of seeing the ordinary as a place where an opening or escape might be found, without yet explaining what she herself hoped to escape.

What the date reveals—and leaves unresolved

Bénédicte told Éric that she was married and had two children, a seven-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old girl. But she did not clarify why she described her existence as ruined, herself as discarded, or her life as that of an abandoned young woman. Éric also learned little about her husband; she showed little inclination to discuss him. These omissions give the first meeting its particular tension: personal distress is plainly signaled, but its circumstances remain withheld until the later conversation.

At the end of the meeting, near the Metro entrance created by Jean-Michel Othoniel, Bénédicte asked whether Éric had started another novel. He had not. He spoke of struggling to begin again after the success of his previous book, fearing that he could not reproduce the happiness and sense of transfiguration associated with completing it. Her question thus turned the conversation back toward writing at the very moment when Éric was disclosing his own uncertainty. In September, by contrast, Bénédicte would confide in him for four hours. March 2008 stands as the cautious first encounter: a meeting in which her reading and an image of hidden possibility were visible before the private history that gave them urgency.