Déni

Déni, or denial of reality, is the refuge characters reach for when acknowledging what may have happened would threaten their loyalties, self-image, or sense of a bearable life. In the Farel case, it is most sharply embodied by Claire Farel: she tells herself she believes her son, Alexandre Farel, even as testimony and memory make that certainty increasingly difficult to sustain. The novel presents denial not as a simple lie but as a retreat from evidence, with consequences for both private relationships and public judgment.

A defense against painful knowledge

Claire’s doubt begins to take shape as she listens to Mila Wizman’s testimony and recalls the detailed account in Mila’s first interview. The possibility that Alexandre raped Mila is no longer an abstraction, yet Claire’s attachment to her son pulls against what she has heard. She had raised him, and the thought that he might have harmed someone confronts her not only with his conduct but with her own responsibility as a mother.

After Alexandre’s police custody, Claire had asked him directly whether he raped Mila. He replied that he did not think he had; he described himself as possibly too insistent while under the influence of alcohol and cocaine, perhaps having gone too far, and regretted any force or mistaken reading of Mila’s intentions. He also presented the incident as one night of excess rather than an act that should define his life. Claire embraced him and said she believed him, warning him not to drink again. Her choice of what to warn against matters: she named alcohol, not forcing a woman. Looking back, she recognizes that she had helped sustain an account that displaced the central question.

The family story Claire had protected

Claire’s self-reproach extends beyond that conversation. She wonders whether she had raised Alexandre like a king and enclosed him in an aggressive model of masculinity. Her mother had taught her to protect herself from men’s advances, but Claire fears she failed to teach her son that desire could not be imposed by force. The gap between those lessons turns her professed confidence in him into a painful contradiction: she had publicly defended him while privately confronting the possibility that he had violated a principle she herself had learned through experience.

During the investigation, Claire withdrew into her home rather than give her opinion. Her silence was not simply absence from public debate; she understood it as a personal failure and an intimate betrayal of the values she had publicly claimed. The novel connects this retreat to a broader history of experiences she had endured without rebelling, including sexist remarks and harassment. Her difficulty is therefore twofold: she must reckon with what may have happened to Mila and with how often she has found ways to accommodate or evade the realities of male power.

The pressure of public narratives

The case becomes public within hours of Alexandre’s arrest after information is circulated by Agence France-Presse. Jean Farel fears that the accusation against his son will stain his own name as well. Maître Célérier’s public response rejects the allegations and frames the encounter as an ordinary event between consenting people. Later, amid the post-Weinstein wave of women speaking about abuse, the trial draws intense attention. Demonstrators, journalists, and social-media users publicly take positions before the court has reached a verdict; Claire, meanwhile, refuses to sign public statements and remains silent.

This conflict makes denial more than a private family defense. Public claims can settle into labels before legal judgment, while the insistence that a case is already decided can itself obscure what the trial must establish. Maître Célérier argues that media condemnation has destroyed Alexandre’s life and damaged the presumption of innocence; his argument is part of the novel’s portrayal of the case’s competing narratives, not a finding that resolves the allegation. The pressure cuts in more than one direction: public outrage can flatten the legal question, but a family’s protective account can also minimize testimony that demands attention.

Denial and the limits of certainty

At the trial, Claire’s dilemma becomes explicit. She wants to assess Mila’s account objectively, yet her emotional attachment makes it seem, to her, excessive and one-sided; at the same time, Alexandre faces the possibility of up to fifteen years in prison. Claire recognizes that she has repeatedly acted against the values she professed. The novel names the deeper mechanism: denial is the substitute for reality that she has used in order to bear it, and violence is linked not only to physical force but also to the falsification of one’s own life.

The narrative does not make Claire’s eventual doubt a verdict on Alexandre’s guilt. Instead, it distinguishes the burden of hearing testimony from the legal determination of what happened. Her movement from reassurance toward uncertainty shows the human cost of maintaining a protective story when the evidence has become harder to ignore. In this sense, denial preserves a relationship for a time, but it cannot make the underlying question disappear.