The Vosges are the setting of Bénédicte Ombredanne’s secret excursion with Christian and the anxious return that follows. For her, the journey briefly interrupts the close monitoring imposed by Jean-François; afterward, the region becomes the subject of his relentless questioning and a landscape through which the novel considers passion, vulnerability, and the possibility of carrying on after painful events.

Setting and constrained freedom

Bénédicte explains that she has no mobile phone because Jean-François fears she might use one to build a social life beyond his reach. He requires her to be contactable on the home telephone, knows her timetable, and expects her to return after classes. Although she describes herself as not captive and able to go out for errands, she also recognizes that he follows her movements and knows where she is. Her excursion into the Vosges is therefore not simply a change of scenery: she has deliberately disappeared from his view for several hours and anticipates consequences when she returns.

The excursion and the journey home

Bénédicte leaves Christian’s house at seven in the evening. On the way, she stops at a service station beside the highway to refuel and call her family. Jean-François answers; she gives him a reassuring account of a drive in the Vosges, says that she ran out of fuel, and promises to explain later. When he starts shouting, she ends the call. The brief exchange is enough to convince her that returning will be terrible, and she is no longer in a hurry to get home.

She drives moderately on the right-hand lane, lingering behind German lorries before passing them with apprehension. She reaches rue Saint-Pierre in Metz’s Sablon district at about 8:45 p.m. The contrast between the hours spent away and the careful, fearful drive back makes the Vosges both a place of temporary departure and the starting point of an expected confrontation.

Landscape, memory, and the return

On a different stretch of her route, the succession of historical signs commemorating battles and regional catastrophes prompts reflection on how trauma can accumulate within an otherwise continuous landscape. Fields, trees, and the passing of time remain alongside the record of conflict; life continues, and renewal remains possible. That thought gives the journey a broader meaning, but on the evening of her return she finds no comparable commemorative signs between Strasbourg and Metz.

Bénédicte would have welcomed such a sign as a source of comfort, and as a reminder of the self-mocking humor associated with her online identity, Playmobil677. Instead, she imagines herself as a soldier being sent toward a front she cannot control. The feared front lies at home. Her arrival in the Sablon district, where she parks trembling and switches off her headlights, closes the journey on an image of uncertain visibility rather than release.

The Vosges in the aftermath

After the excursion, the Vosges remain present through Jean-François’s interrogation. He demands the names of villages, an exact account of her route, descriptions of the landscape, where she ate, where the car ran out of fuel, and the name of the mechanic. He turns the trip into an accusation, treating its unanswered details as evidence against her. The region thus becomes more than a destination: it is the terrain around which his surveillance and questioning tighten.

The questioning grows into a daily pattern. Jean-François calls repeatedly, wakes Bénédicte at night, and resumes pressing her when they are alone. His fixation on reconstructing the excursion carries the control of her movements into her sleep and private space. In this way, the novel sets the open landscape of the Vosges against the narrowing world of the home she returns to: the journey offers a brief interval beyond her husband’s oversight, but cannot prevent that oversight from following her back.