Rémi Vidal

Rémi Vidal is an engineering student and friend of Alexandre Farel whose inventions and behavior expose the sexualized, competitive rituals beneath the polished ambition of France’s elite-school milieu. He created a website that rated women and publicized who slept with whom, then initiated a party game in which men competed to obtain women’s underwear; the contest leads Alexandre to approach Mila Wizman as a target. Rémi’s later boasts about extraordinary finance-sector salaries extend the same logic of ranking from women to careers, making him a compact but consequential figure in the novel’s account of status, performance, and male peer culture.

Identity and Background

Rémi is a fellow engineering student, slightly older than Alexandre, with a short, muscular build. Their friendship belongs to a cohort formed in selective Parisian high schools and preparatory classes and brought together in elite engineering schools. The students’ friendships are genuine, but they also anticipate professional networks: social ties can become career assets, and personal affinity coexists with calculations of future advantage.

The group’s expected destinations are already sharply defined. Its members imagine careers at major technology companies, investment banks, consulting firms, or, most coveted of all, hedge funds. Rémi’s later talk of salaries and bonuses makes explicit the scale by which this world measures success: not simply employment, but the prestige and compensation attached to each opportunity.

The Website and the Party Game

Rémi had created a website upon entering engineering school that ranked girls by attractiveness and disclosed who was sleeping with whom. It converted women’s appearance and sexual lives into material for male spectatorship and comparison. The site’s classificatory premise anticipates the party game he proposes: women are not simply people to meet but objects to be evaluated, selected, and turned into proof of a man’s standing among his peers.

At a party in a loft in Paris’s eighteenth arrondissement, Rémi is the first to call for “action.” The game requires each man to seduce a woman and return with one of her undergarments before two in the morning. A participant who fails must post a photograph of himself in his underwear to Facebook or Instagram for thirty minutes. The rules make sexual access a competition, while the threatened online image turns failure into public humiliation. The group’s excitement is described through a charged mix of adrenaline, fear, moral stakes, and masculine expression: the game treats transgression as a test of virility.

Rémi’s own assigned target is a red-haired business-school student who had been given the campus title “golden seductress,” a label the group translates into a claim that half the campus had slept with her. Alexandre is assigned Mila, who appears reserved and out of place among the partygoers. He does not tell the others that she is the daughter of his mother’s partner. The concealment leaves the game’s social logic intact: Mila is selected as a target, while Alexandre’s private connection to her is kept outside the group’s view.

Consequences for Alexandre and Mila

The contest supplies the immediate setting for Alexandre’s encounter with Mila. After she feels unwell, he accompanies her outside. When she refuses to smoke cannabis in a park, he calls her timid and suggests going to a building’s utility room, where they use drugs, kiss, and have sex. He obtains her underwear, fulfilling the game’s demand, and only afterward tells her that the encounter was a hazing ritual. She cries. Alexandre panics at her tears, leaves her in the street, and returns to the party with the garment in his pocket.

Rémi is not described as present in the utility room, and the account does not establish that he knows the details of Alexandre’s encounter. His role is nevertheless pivotal: he devised the contest whose terms turn seduction into a wager and the woman’s underwear into its token. The episode exposes the distance between the group’s language of play and the consequences for the person made to play along without knowing the rules.

The next morning, Alexandre cannot remember the events clearly. He wonders whether drugs and alcohol made him forceful or brutal, fixates on Mila crying, and tries to persuade himself that he was not in his normal state. His uncertainty and distress contrast with the game’s crisp deadline and measurable prize. The rule can count a garment as a win; it has no way to account for Mila’s experience or Alexandre’s effort to evade what happened.

Career Competition and Narrative Significance

Later in the night, after Alexandre returns to the gathering, the conversation turns from sexual competition to employment. Alexandre calls a developer position at Google the royal route, but Rémi rejects the idea of accepting what he considers an inferior offer. He says Airbnb pays $180,000 a year, compared with $130,000 at Google, and recounts nearly hanging up on Uber after hearing an offer of $110,000. He insists that he is not accepting charity and predicts that he will instead work for a New York hedge fund for $250,000, with the possibility of doubling that amount through a bonus.

The argument gives Rémi a second form of the same ranking mentality visible in his website and party game. Here, opportunities and people are sorted by comparative value: a job is judged by its salary, just as women were sorted by looks and sexual reputation. His confident declarations also throw Alexandre’s agitation into relief. Alexandre concludes that the exchange amounts to “all that for this,” feels on the verge of collapse, and leaves in a taxi.

Rémi’s limited appearances leave his private life and later fate unelaborated. What the novel does establish is the force of his influence within a peer group: he invents the website, initiates the contest, and voices an unapologetic hierarchy of salaries and career destinations. Through him, social and professional competition appear not as separate pressures but as related expressions of a culture that turns intimacy, reputation, and future prospects into things to be ranked and won.