Alexandre Farel

Alexandre Farel is the celebrated son of Jean Farel and Claire Farel: a gifted student whose academic distinction and professional prospects conceal a history of distress and an inability to handle frustration or intimacy. After he sexually assaults Mila Wizman, his conviction exposes the gap between the vulnerable, accomplished young man admired by those around him and the person capable of exploiting another’s trust. His release on a suspended sentence does not repair that harm; the novel ends by showing him turning loneliness and relational failure into the premise for a business promising affection without risk.

Identity and Background

Alexandre’s early life is framed by achievement. He was reading, counting, and writing at three, and excelled from the beginning of school. He attended a prestigious Paris lycée, received distinction each year, entered a highly selective scientific preparatory program, and was admitted to École polytechnique at nineteen, ranking third. He later went to Stanford University, where he had been living for six months while pursuing one of the world’s leading courses of study. His father, Jean, an autodidact who had risen through the media world, took particular pride in having a son who was a polytechnicien and repeatedly called him the greatest success of his life. Alexandre’s record therefore served both as a personal identity and as an emblem of Jean’s own achievement.

That bright public profile did not describe the whole of him. As a child, Alexandre had been sensitive, withdrawn, and shy. In preparatory school he often felt challenged and defeated; soon after entering École polytechnique, he experienced a severe crisis. The school’s compulsory military training, strict discipline, and daily exertion at the La Courtine military camp abruptly replaced the intellectual routine of his preparation years with a demanding physical regime. Three weeks into the training, he attempted suicide and was hospitalized in a state of exhaustion and acute distress. He left believing that the episode would remain unknown, worried that disclosure could damage the reputation and future opportunities attached to his record.

His parents were present during that crisis and, in its aftermath, overprotected him. The novel places his experience within the pressure surrounding elite education: the institutions that select and train future members of the national elite also expose students to intense competition, while suicide remains a taboo. Alexandre’s distress is thus not presented as cancelling his privilege or achievement; rather, the two coexist, and the pressure to keep his vulnerability concealed helps explain the divide between his visible success and private instability.

Family, Separation, and Emotional Life

Alexandre learned of his parents’ separation by telephone in autumn 2015, while he was thousands of kilometres away. His first response was practical: he asked where he would stay when he came to Paris. Claire told him he would stay at Jean’s home, since the apartment she shared with her new partner, Adam Wizman, was too small. Alexandre resented that Claire had moved out while he was away, without facing him or explaining herself. During a Thanksgiving visit, however, he performed the role of the understanding, accommodating son, while privately wishing to cause a dramatic rupture.

He did not tell Claire what he thought of Adam or Adam’s daughters, Mila and Noa. Instead, he confided in Jean, whom he recognized as a receptive ally. At their first meeting, Adam asked Alexandre about his studies and showed him photographs of the girls; they then met at a kosher restaurant. Alexandre and the young women exchanged a few words and found little in common. He judged Adam and his daughters harshly, and the account makes clear that family strain was sharpened by his willingness to confide in the parent most likely to confirm his hostility. At the same time, his relationship with both parents included sincere attachment as well as distrust. Admiration was familiar; physical tenderness was not.

The strain in the family coincided with Alexandre’s fear of losing Claire. In a job interview, he could not speak of her cancer without trembling, and could not present the truth of his earlier suicide attempt for fear it would disqualify him. Instead, he searched for an acceptable answer to the question about his greatest trial. His attention to professional presentation thus extended into the handling of intimate pain: experiences that might expose need or vulnerability became facts to conceal.

His academic and career ambitions also shaped his relationships. While still a student, Alexandre had a short, intense affair with Yasmina Vasseur, a thirty-four-year-old adviser at the Ministry of the Economy, where he was completing an internship. Their relationship developed gradually and lasted six months. Yasmina ended it because she saw no future in a relationship with someone planning to live in the United States while she pursued a demanding political career. When she discovered that she was pregnant, she had an abortion and left him. At the time of the later trial, she described him as intellectually quick, responsible, sensitive, and generous, but emotionally immature and unable to tolerate resistance. Her account preserves the contradictions in his character without treating emotional vulnerability as an excuse for what he later did.

From Social Performance to the Assault

On the night of 11–12 January 2016, Alexandre was at a gathering with former engineering-school peers, where competition and masculine display governed a degrading game. Each man was expected to seduce a woman and return with one of her undergarments; failure carried a public humiliation as a forfeit. The group selected Mila as Alexandre’s target. He did not disclose that she was the daughter of his mother’s partner, and no one at the gathering had noticed that he had arrived with her.

Mila appeared uncomfortable and out of place, sitting apart with a glass of water. Alexandre had spoken with her earlier and knew she was reserved; she initially said she did not drink non-kosher alcohol. At his insistence, she drank champagne, then felt unwell and wanted to get some air. He accompanied her. Instead of taking her back to safety, he brought her to a nearby building room known to a drug dealer. They used drugs, and sexual contact followed. Alexandre took her underwear as the game required. When he told her the encounter had been part of a hazing ritual, she began to cry. He panicked, left her in the street, and returned to the gathering with the garment in his pocket.

Back at the apartment, the conversation among the men turned to salaries and career destinations. Alexandre argued that becoming a developer at Google was the surest route; Rémi Vidal responded that Airbnb offered a higher salary, while he himself expected to join a New York hedge fund for a much larger compensation package. The exchange reduced professional futures to a contest of status and earnings, echoing the earlier game’s use of women as proof of masculine standing. Tense and distressed, Alexandre left by taxi in the middle of the night.

The following day, he could not stop recalling Mila’s tears. He wondered whether he had been too forceful and recognized that he should not have taken her to the building room, yet tried to reassure himself that drugs and alcohol meant he had not been himself. The recollection did not settle into a clear admission; it became a conflict between his partial recognition of harm and his effort to contain what had happened. He took Xanax, showered, and arranged to return to San Francisco the next day, telling his parents that an important Google interview required him to leave early. Neither parent responded. His abrupt departure folded the immediate aftermath into his longstanding sense that, when his parents did not answer, he was alone.

Testimony, Conviction, and Consequences

At the trial, Yasmina was the last witness to testify. She described the six-month relationship she had had with Alexandre in 2015 and offered a mixed assessment: he could be responsible, intelligent, sensitive, and generous, but emotionally immature and frustrated by resistance. Her evidence gave the court a portrait of a man capable of genuine tenderness and of conduct that did not conform to that portrait. It did not erase the assault on Mila, which the prosecution identified as the central fact at issue.

In closing, the prosecutor acknowledged that sexual intercourse between Alexandre and Mila on the night of 11–12 January 2016 was not disputed. The dispute, as the prosecutor framed it, concerned Alexandre’s character and how he had crossed the line into criminal conduct. The argument set his vulnerability, work ethic, and attention to others against a capacity to be contemptuous, violent, possessive, and jealous. It characterized the assault as opportunistic: an occasion was available, and he took it. The prosecutor also stressed the cost to Mila, including the shame and fear that can prevent survivors from speaking, and the ordeal of reporting, medical examinations, and appearing before a jury.

The prosecutor nevertheless sought a sentence that would permit Alexandre to remain outside prison, citing his lack of a prior record, his professional integration, and expert assessments that found no risk of renewed offending. The requested sentence was five years’ imprisonment, suspended. It was not presented as leniency without consequence: any new offence during the five-year period could revoke the suspension and send him to prison. In this account, the sentence holds two realities together—the prosecutor’s recognition that Alexandre was guilty and the argument that his punishment should reflect his personal history and prospects for reintegration.

Before the verdict, Alexandre was asked whether he had anything to add. He stood and addressed Mila directly, saying he had never intended to hurt her and asking forgiveness if she had suffered because of him. That statement did not undo the harm or resolve the difference between his account of intention and the consequences Mila endured. The jury found him guilty of rape and sentenced him to five years in prison, suspended. He was released, but the suspended term remained in force, with imprisonment a consequence of any reoffence.

The verdict divided the aftermath as sharply as it divided the courtroom. Claire briefly signalled to her son, then hurried to the glass dock to speak with him; he was to return to Fresnes Prison for the administrative release process, and she expected to meet him there. Mila remained seated, holding her father’s hand, upright and still. Her lawyers left quickly to address the press, calling the verdict unjust and partial and reserving the possibility of an appeal. Outside the courtroom, Claire encountered Adam. Their silent exchange carried the disappointment of choices that had damaged their relationship. Evading the gathered photographers, Claire found a marble bench and began to cry. The trial’s outcome had not restored the life she had lost: over two years, her marriage, family, and carefully managed career had come apart, and she had continued to support Alexandre to the end.

Loving and the Meaning of the Ending

The novel’s closing glimpse of Alexandre is not a private reconciliation but a public pitch. By then, he is one of two founders of Loving, a startup that has raised five million dollars. The company uses artificial intelligence to create virtual correspondents with whom users can pursue friendship or romance. Users can choose the correspondent’s intellectual level and personalize an evolving icon; the product promises conversation like that with a real person. It is aimed at people who are lonely or socially uncomfortable, and sells the possibility of loving and being loved without risk or harm.

Addressing investors, Alexandre presents his own history as part of the company’s origin story. He says that after a romantic breakup he went off course, lost trust in himself and in others, and made mistakes he regrets. He recounts that he conceived the project during the few weeks he was imprisoned, when he felt rejected and unable to communicate with anyone; he does not explain to the investors why he was imprisoned. The omission matters. The same experience of isolation that becomes the startup’s founding narrative is detached from the person he harmed and from the conviction that led to his confinement.

Loving therefore gives the ending its sharpest irony. Alexandre turns the failure of human relationships into a marketable promise of relationships without damage, while his own history includes a conviction for violating Mila’s trust. The novel does not claim that his new venture resolves that contradiction. Instead, his polished entrepreneurial story shows how readily pain and wrongdoing can be recast as lessons in self-discovery, leaving the consequences for others outside the frame. His brilliance, vulnerability, ambition, and capacity for harm remain intertwined at the close.