Aurélie tells the man to end their relationship in person

Aurélie’s decision to end the relationship in person is the point at which ordinary courtesy becomes dangerous. She goes to the man she has recently met to tell him she wants to stop seeing him, but her effort to reject him gently gives him an opening to deny the finality of her choice. In her later account to fellow patients at Clinique Sainte-Blandine, the encounter emerges as a contest between her clear refusal and his insistence on an imagined future together.

Background to the Breakup

Before she tried to end things, Aurélie had met the man at Metz Plage, where she sometimes went alone in summer evenings to listen to concerts from a deck chair. She noticed him looking at her but deliberately avoided meeting his gaze; she was generally cautious with men and kept a guarded manner so that they would not mistake it for encouragement. After a concert she had not particularly enjoyed, she began walking home. He caught up with her and asked to make her acquaintance. Although she initially said she could not stay, his precise vocabulary and polished manner put her at ease, and the exchange seemed to her like a chance meeting between two people of the same age.

He gave her his telephone number, and a few days later she called him. When she visited his studio the following Saturday, they talked and kissed. His unusually devotional attention made her uncomfortable, but she did not yet grasp what it signified. They caressed one another and she took off her bra; when the evening seemed to be moving toward sex, she said she needed to go home and sleep after a long, difficult week. He offered to let her sleep there without touching her. Aurélie believed that she could trust him not to touch her, but she still had no wish to stay. That distinction—trusting his immediate promise while not wanting further intimacy—did not amount to the deeper attachment he later claimed she felt.

The Face-to-Face Rejection

Aurélie chose to visit him because she believed it was improper to break up remotely, particularly with a man she considered kind and cultivated. She also had a pronounced concern for other people’s feelings. Rather than simply ending the relationship or leaving without explanation, she sat with him on the sofa and tried to find the mildest possible language. She praised him and said she respected him, while also trying to make clear that she had decided to end things and had nothing more to offer.

Her care with phrasing worked against her purpose. She softened her aversion and repeatedly qualified the finality of her decision; she even described their previous evening as pleasant while saying she wanted to stop. In her later telling, she recognizes that such courtesies might have made her seem uncertain, as though she could still be persuaded. The scene turns on that mismatch: for Aurélie, gentleness is a way to make a rejection less humiliating; for the man, it becomes material with which to dispute the rejection.

They talked for two hours. He insisted that she would change her mind, that she loved him without yet understanding it, and that the speed and force of their meeting had naturally unsettled her. He treated their kiss as proof of deep, reciprocal feeling and presented himself as confident that she would eventually recognize their future together. His claims did not respond to what she was saying; they replaced it with a story in which her refusal was only a passing disturbance on the way to love.

The Encounter Recalled at Clinique Sainte-Blandine

Aurélie eventually left after the conversation became mired in repetitions of love, tenderness, devotion, and certainty about the future. She had tried to state that the relationship was over, but he answered as though she had agreed only to pause it until she could absorb the shock of their meeting. Her final departure ends the visit, not the argument: he continues to treat his own conviction as more authoritative than her expressed decision.

The account is framed by questions from the people listening to Aurélie at Clinique Sainte-Blandine. Marie-France asks what happened next, and Bénédicte Ombredanne wonders how Aurélie could have ended up in such a situation after leaving in time and not spending the night with the man. Aurélie answers with a long, sorrowful sigh and a strained smile. She understands that the listeners may think no one would voluntarily enter the ordeal she has endured, yet she identifies her own mistake in going back to explain herself with such consideration. The narration gives that mistake a precise shape: not consent, but a reluctance to hurt someone who was already refusing to hear her.

Significance

The breakup encounter exposes the difference between speaking a decision and having that decision acknowledged. Aurélie’s words are meant to end the relationship; the man turns them into evidence for delay, uncertainty, and eventual reconciliation. Her politeness is not presented as an invitation, but its careful qualifications make the exchange easier for him to distort. The episode therefore marks the beginning of the trap she describes: an ordinary attempt to leave, prolonged by his refusal to accept that her feelings and intentions belong to her.