I’ll never forget the day that Dominique accompanied Joël, then a newly qualified doctor, on call. Joël’s car wouldn’t start so he asked his father if he could borrow his, but Denis refused, and it was Dominique who offered to take him on his rounds in his 2CV. He drove his brother to wherever he was needed by his patients. For a few brief hours, he was in Joël’s world. But only for a few hours.

  By the time of our remarriage both men had grown portly and grey, but while Joël had been a doctor and a local councillor, not to mention the mayor for the last eighteen years, Dominique could still only fantasise about professional success. I lived with the ups and downs of his hopes and failures. On our second wedding day, under his brother’s authority, he was symbolically formalising his sole accomplishment, which had reconciled him to himself and to life and distanced him from his childhood. In other words, us.

  We celebrated our nuptials in a beautifully restored old farmhouse near Tours. It was a lovely party, a reparation in a way: the wedding we never had, the one that my father-in-law had denied us thirty-four years before. Now he had been dead for three years and couldn’t hurt us any more. We didn’t miss him. I did, though, miss my own father. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of him, even today. Years afterwards, I had told him how Dominique’s father had stolen our savings, and how sad I’d been at my own wedding; how I would have loved to have had long tables covered in white linen as he had requested, but that I’d decided not to say anything. ‘If I’d known that,’ he responded softly, ‘I would never have given the marriage my blessing.’ But I wouldn’t have listened to him anyway. I wouldn’t have listened to anyone. That was my whole story. And here I was, marrying the same man for a second time. We did not sing Michel Fugain’s ‘Une belle histoire’, but an even older song, Edith Piaf’s ‘Mon Dieu’, a plea to be allowed to see her lover again for just one day.

  Within a couple of years, Dominique was no longer able to keep paying his trainees. When his business partner retired his clients vanished. He couldn’t manage on his own. He asked me to help him out, so I took out a loan of 4,000 euros. Soon he was no longer allowed a chequebook. All the warning lights were flashing. I knew the story so well. Mainly I was worried for Florian, who was officially the company director. I didn’t want him to start out in life burdened by his father’s debts and failures. I raised the limit on my line of credit from the Sofinco consumer finance company, which meant we had access to a large sum of money, at eighteen per cent interest. The following year Dominique closed the office. Shuttered the company. He threw in the towel and took early retirement. Which meant that repaying his debts now fell entirely to me.

  The rent was too high for us to carry on living in our house in Noisy-le-Grand. Céline found us a modest apartment in Villiers-sur-Marne. It was too small for Florian to live with us, but he was twenty-four and old enough to leave home – not that he was given any choice in the matter, or the freedom to make the decision himself. He moved in with his girlfriend, Aurore, not far from us. I had the sense that he was distancing himself from his father. He seemed resentful, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. Sometimes he said, ‘I did everything you expected of me,’ and it was true. He had taken on considerable risk by becoming his father’s front man. He began to realise this when the bank started to look more closely at the company’s accounts. But now I know there was much more to it than that. Florian had seen the kinds of Google searches Dominique was doing online. Because he was in charge of fixing his father’s computer when anything went wrong – he was the only one who knew what to do – he had discovered the keywords Dominique was using when he was looking for sex. This was in addition to the time when Aurore, Florian’s partner, had walked in on Dominique masturbating. After that Florian stopped sniggering with the rest of us at Dominique’s email address – ‘Fétiche45’ – which I was always nagging him to change. His father was diving deep into pornography as well as ruining us financially. But Florian hadn’t dared to tell me about it.

  I now know that Dominique was caught upskirting in a supermarket not far from our apartment as early as 2010, the year he stopped working, and that the security guards had called the police. I only found out about this in 2023, thanks to the investigation. Much too late.

  If I had known at the time, my life would certainly have changed. I would have looked at him differently. I’d have pushed him to see a psychologist. I’d have questioned him about his relationships with women, and with me. But even then I would no doubt have been inclined to forgive him, just as I was ten years later, the afternoon I got off the train from Paris and he confessed what he’d been caught doing in the Leclerc supermarket in Carpentras. But at least the alarm bells would have begun to ring.

  In 2010 the police clearly didn’t think filming under women’s skirts was terribly serious, because he got away with a fine of 100 euros, and I never heard a thing about it. I’d go into work early in the morning, leaving him on his own at home. He had retired but I was planning to carry on working for another two or three years. I didn’t follow Séverine Brachet into new projects as she suggested because that would have meant too much travelling. I didn’t want that: my priority was always our marriage and our home life.

  It was when I began training the people who would succeed me at EDF that I realised how far I had come. Meanwhile Dominique and I were starting to think about where we were going to retire, mapping out the path that would lead us to Mazan.

  We weren’t old, not yet sixty, but we had reached the stage in life where everything finally seems to be falling into place. But there are things one forgets, things one wants to forget, dreams that tell us something about our vague, drifting anxieties that we don’t pay attention to because we already have what matters most to us, a life that feels as if it was meant to be. If I had been asked to describe us then, I would simply have said we were an inseparable couple with three children and many grandchildren, the family of my dreams.

  In 2011, when Nathan was five, Charlize and Clémence were born. There were no places at the crèche, so David and Céline asked us if we would take care of them during the week. Because Dominique wasn’t working he looked after the twins by himself on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, from morning to late afternoon. We laughed whenever we saw that he’d buttoned up their dresses back to front. I loved that he was with his granddaughters, and looked forward to Fridays, when it was my turn. I was so happy to be basking again in the affection of little ones. Little did I know that my husband had already begun to drug me and film himself raping me. That he would even do so years later when the children were spending part of their school holidays in Mazan. He admitted it in court: he hadn’t invited anyone over that evening; he had drugged and raped me while Nathan, Charlize and Clémence were sleeping in the next room. They came into my bedroom to wake me up the next day. Their grandfather had asked them to let me ‘sleep’, but they were surprised to find Maminou still in bed at noon. They slapped my cheeks, trying to get me to open my eyes, but in vain.

  Is the shadow cast over my life nothing but an endless return to that moment, when the child tries to wake her mother – then her grandmother – from a suspicious sleep resembling death?

  Fourteen

  ‘How are you feeling about the trial?’ Gwenola Journot, the examining magistrate, asked me.

  ‘To be honest, extremely apprehensive. I don’t know how I’m going to react. I have no memories of anything, but it will all become much more real when I see them standing there in court.’

  ‘Are you ready to watch the video evidence of what they did to you?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to be traumatised for the rest of my life. In a way, watching them would be like being raped all over again. If they’re shown during the trial I shall leave the courtroom. I do not want to see them.’

  It was January 3rd 2023. According to the transcript, the interview was almost over. Stéphane Babonneau, my new lawyer, sat beside me. I told Journot that when the time came, I wanted the trial to be held behind closed doors. ‘For the sake of my mental health, obviously, I won’t be making any comments or having any contact with the media. I’ll let my lawyers speak for me. I intend to be as inconspicuous as possible.’

  * * *

  • • •

  It feels very strange to read those words today. It’s me, I recognise myself. At that point I still believed that suffering must not show; it should stay hidden, like our grief at the loss of those we have loved. It hardens inside you and in turn hardens you. I had always lived like that, and I fully intended to continue doing so. I didn’t yet realise that this time I wasn’t confronting death, but a terrible poison. Unlike grief, it destroys your memories – all of them – one by one, until even your sense of self is gone.

  The magistrate asked me if Dominique had ever told me that when he was thirteen and working on a building site he had witnessed the gang rape of a young woman. He had told her about it: how he had been made to participate, how the men had forced his face into the victim’s vulva. It was like discovering the outcome of a story whose ending I had never heard before. Dominique had often brought up a peculiar memory of a building site where his half-brother, André, a carpenter, had helped him get a job. He was just a kid, and some of the guys had put him through a sort of initiation ritual. He never told me exactly what it was, he simply said he was frightened; he’d raised the hammer he happened to be holding and threatened to hit the first man to come near. He never went beyond that point in the story. He looked so sad whenever he talked about it. I sensed there was more to it than that, but I never pushed him to disclose anything further, and so I had never heard about any gang rape. But it didn’t seem out of place in the picture I had of his youth. He was running away from something when I met him. And I wasn’t surprised that he was now drawing on his childhood traumas to mount his defence.

  I know the magistrate struggled to grasp how my mind worked. ‘She thinks you’re protecting your husband,’ Stéphane told me afterwards. I wasn’t, of course. But it was so painful to listen to this, to know how he’d been subjected to male brutality. I had been his ally, his love, his passport to freedom, and now I was confronted with his crimes. I was simply trying to understand.

  The magistrate had already moved on. It was the perpetrator she was interested in. I was hit with an avalanche of horrifying information. Dominique, in an act of sordid reciprocity, had raped the drugged wife of one of the rapists. He had forcefully instructed the men who raped me not to wear a condom. Some of the rapists had even stalked me: they wanted to see me in daylight, so Dominique told them when and where we did our shopping and they’d follow me around the supermarket. It was staggering to hear how his monstrous behaviour had consumed everything, invaded even the most basic aspects of our life. The magistrate showed me some photographs and asked if any of the faces were familiar. Of course they weren’t. I’d never had any suspicions as I walked up and down the supermarket aisles, keeping a careful eye on our budget, completely oblivious to the people brushing past me. Their names meant nothing to me either. All those faces of all those ordinary men repulsed me. I didn’t want to know anything about them. I wasn’t ready for that. But I also knew that the moment I would have to face them in court was drawing near.

  The magistrate told me that one of the men was insisting that I had consented. He claimed it was impossible for me to have been raped so many times over so many years without knowing what was going on, to be completely unaware that so many men were abusing me over such a long period of time. He said he had discussed it with other women, and they had all agreed it was impossible.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ she asked.

  I don’t know why she asked me what I thought. Perhaps it was to prepare me for their line of defence. I had no reaction except disgust. I said that the man who talked like that was a thoroughly vile person, and I was ready for a face-to-face confrontation if that was what he wanted. The saddest thing was that this view was being widely put about, which I knew because people saw fit to tell me. He must have known this too, and no doubt it emboldened him to reject the evidence of the images and arrogantly use women’s words to back him up.

  This was what awaited me.

  I sighed deeply. ‘I’ll have to go through this with every single one of them at the trial, won’t I? It’s going to be unbearable.’

  I often thought about what the forensic pathologist who had examined me early on had said. ‘You know, whenever my husband brings me a croissant from the boulangerie in the morning, I always wonder what he’s trying to hide,’ she said. I’m sure she was married to a wonderful man, but by extending the suspicion to her own life, she seemed to be trying to protect me, to reassure me that as women we are all capable of being deceived. She had sensed, that day, that beyond the pain of the revelations and the shame of my body being turned into a sack, there was also the shame of having understood nothing – of feeling like an idiot in the eyes of others, and in my own. Professional experience had taught her about the loneliness that lay ahead for me, and the isolation that rape victims suffer.

  How was I to stop the lie spreading that I had been aware of what was happening? How to describe my fear of dying, the twelve kilos I’d lost, the multiple gynaecologists and neurologists I had consulted, the inconclusive brain scan? How to explain that I had no idea that someone could love another and yet cause them so much pain? How, simply, to explain who I was? For fifty years, I had tried to find myself in a man’s eyes. And he in mine – until he tried to extinguish them.

  I wasn’t afraid of Dominique. Of course, he was the leader of that disgusting pack of rapists – that I didn’t deny – but because I knew him, I set him apart from the rest. I was eager to confront him. I had so many questions, for the sake of our shared history, our children, our marriage, even more so now that the Nanterre criminal-investigation unit was pursuing its own inquiries. Over the following weeks, the police interviewed my old friend, Pascale, and Dominique’s half-sister, Geneviève. They both called to tell me. I know they also questioned Michèle, the woman he’d lived with for a few months after we had briefly separated. They were searching. Scouring every corner of his life. They wanted to charge him with murder.

  A few months later, during the Easter holidays, two police officers turned up at Florian’s house in Thenon, in the Dordogne. I was spending a few days there with the children. They needed to question us again. They showed us a photograph of a man we had sold a car to back when we were still living in Gournay-sur-Marne. It turned out that a few years later he had ended up in prison. We knew nothing about him. When they left they took with them Dominique’s toolbox, which Florian had brought from the house in Mazan, but they found no clues there.

  Through his lawyer, Dominique had requested the exhumation of Sophie Narme’s body, so that a DNA test could be carried out. I chose to see this as a sign that he had nothing to hide. I needed to believe it. Even as I write this, I can hear the disapproval of people who think I am making excuses for him. I needed to tell myself that I had not spent my life with a murderer, and I was going to cling to that thought until it was proved otherwise. If the DNA test said it was Pelicot, if he ended up confessing, then it was Pelicot. I would not contest the facts, but first I needed them to be established.

  It’s me I am protecting. The few illusions I still have, however tenuous they may be.

  * * *

  • • •

  Once I had returned to the Ile de Ré – once the magistrate and police officers were no longer summoning me for questioning, once I had gone back to living alone, once I’d forced myself to shake off my sorrow – I sometimes found myself making my way to the village of Saint-Clément, where there was a huge circus tent called La Java des Baleines. When night falls and the lights go on, it has all the majesty of an old-fashioned big top surrounded by the ocean. It’s a good place to go for a drink or dinner and to listen to live music or see a show. I often went there with Françoise, Patrice, Eric and plenty of others, and sang and danced – not so much to forget, nor to bury the woman whom the expert psychologists had decided was submissive, whom the rapists called a liar, and whom the magistrate was struggling to understand, but because I have always loved to sing and dance, and I needed to do that now more than ever.

  One evening in June, I found myself sitting next to a man I didn’t know. His name was Jean-Loup. He was cheerful, good-humoured and discreet. He told me he didn’t go out much, which explained why I had never seen him before, despite the many friends we had in common. It was a set-up, the kind of encounter arranged by people who mean well, but that almost always comes to nothing. This time, however, the plan was working perfectly. I imagined our friends exchanging gleeful, conspiratorial glances as we chatted. Our conversation flowed, subtly separating us from others at the table. There was only the very occasional moment of silence.

  I asked all the questions. The first thing everyone always wants to know is how you ended up on the Ile de Ré. Jean-Loup told me he and his wife, Bénédicte, had spent many happy summers on the island with their two children, and eventually decided to retire there. They had sold their house near Versailles and bought a large property that needed a lot of work, but just as the renovations were coming to an end, Bénédicte’s health suddenly deteriorated and she was diagnosed with an incurable and rapidly progressing degenerative condition. Jean-Loup soon found himself having to remind her of his name, and it was clear that they were not going to have the time together they had looked forward to. He fed her, bathed her and tended to all her needs until he was so exhausted that his own health began to suffer. He only agreed to put her into a nursing home after his children encouraged him to do so out of concern for his well-being. She died there, six months before I met him.