The Laurentides serve as a recurring refuge in Loïc’s life, a landscape where intimate relationships expose their limits and solitude becomes a means of recovering, or remaking, the self. Its chalets and lakeside paths frame three distinct passages: a snowy afternoon with Brigitte, his retreat after their separation, and a later stay in which he turns family history into a possible book.

A winter scene with Brigitte

In one chalet in the Laurentides, Loïc watches Brigitte read on the floor beside a fire as snow softens the horizons outside. He has set aside his own reading of Novalis’s Hymnes à la nuit to observe her absorption in a book by Carlos Castenada. The scene belongs to a period when their relationship still holds more delight than torment, and its quiet domestic closeness makes the distance between them more striking.

Loïc reflects on Brigitte’s Catalan background and her father’s devastation by the Spanish Civil War, but he cannot make her inner life fully legible to him. Physical intimacy can briefly seem to bring them to a shared, almost symbiotic state; outside that closeness, she remains opaque. At the window, Loïc sees three birches with loose strips of bark moving in the wind and snow falling almost horizontally. His thoughts turn from Novalis to the immense distances of the universe, including the Hydra cluster of galaxies, which he imagines as an image of the psychic gulf separating him from Brigitte.

Retreat after the breakup

In the 1980s, after the abortion of their unwanted child brings a definitive end to the relationship, Loïc acquires a chalet in the Laurentides. Set apart from the road beside a lake, it offers the solitude he believes he needs to tend his wounds and reconsider his life. Returning to nature also means touching the roots of his childhood and native country; distance from the city may keep him from seeking consolation in another romance.

The retreat coincides with a collapse in his sense of social identity. No longer a civil servant, teacher, journalist, editor, or anyone’s partner, he earns a living by anonymously translating administrative texts. He experiences this period as a plunge into an uncertain darkness, trying to shed identities imposed on him or adopted without awareness. At night, dreams bring back the dead and remnants of former selves. Beneath the lake’s ice, a deep rumbling seems to rise from the earth, though Loïc wonders whether it is only the sound of his own nocturnal distress. Morning snow settles over the scene like a silent blessing, offering a temporary counterweight to the night’s unease.

A place to reconsider the past

Later, after the events of September 11, Loïc rents a chalet in the Laurentides for several weeks to recover physically and mentally. In April, he rereads his journal from the intervening period and begins considering a book inspired by what the family cameo has meant to him and his relatives since childhood. He does not envision a straightforward autobiography, but something closer to autofiction: a way to work through personal memory by telling the story of the object around which so much family history has gathered.

One evening, after spending the day recalling his native village, Loïc walks a trail around the lake. His attention shifts from memory to the spring landscape: swelling buds, fermenting marshes, birds calling among the trees, and puddles reflecting both firs and pieces of sky. The doubled reflections suggest how memory can transform the past. In the Laurentides, retreat does not erase what haunts him; it gives him distance in which to revisit it, and a setting from which to begin turning recollection into narrative.