Jean-Loup didn’t ask me any questions. ‘I found out what happened to you from the papers,’ he told me. Patrice and Eric had shown him an article from Le Monde before we met. They wanted to save me the ordeal of having to tell him what had happened. I felt so embarrassed that he knew, I worried that he would imagine things and see me as nothing but a victim, a defiled woman. But my fears soon evaporated – he didn’t ask me anything about it and I didn’t feel the slightest bit awkward. We had plenty of other things to talk about, most of them perfectly mundane. In fact, that was what made our conversation so enjoyable for the two wounded souls that we were. Later that evening La Java des Baleines became a disco. Every so often the lyrics of some old song popped into my head. We wandered up to the bar to order another crêpe. I never wanted this conversation to end.

  Patrice and Eric had organised it all beautifully. Not long afterwards, the four of us went to see Carmen in Saint-Martin-de-Ré. We had dinner together, then Jean-Loup drove me home. He kissed me on the lips as we said goodbye. I was light-headed with happiness. I needed to love again. I wasn’t afraid. I know only too well that my experience is proof that there are potentially violent rapists among us wherever we are. I know my story has fuelled disgust for men, but it has not done that for me. I know that the image the world had of me at that point was nothing more than of a woman who had been horrifically abused; if I had any memories of the ordeal, I’m sure that is what I would have been reduced to, and it probably would have killed me. But I was forged in a different time and place. The way I think about life was wrought at the moment of my mother’s final breath, when Papa leaned over her and whispered her name, and I squeezed her shoulder and begged her to wake up. In that instant I felt a wave of infinite love wash over me, far stronger than death. That sensation saved me, carried me through, and no doubt also blinded me and warped my judgement, considering everything I endured with Dominique. And yet the feeling persists: love is not dead. I am not dead. I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength. My revenge.

  That summer we began a relationship. There was something hesitant about it, something gloriously tentative, as there often is when you meet someone new, but there was more to it than that. I was afraid of how Jean-Loup would feel about having a new woman in his life. He was worried about what being with a new man might mean for me. We went out to dinner, to the cinema, held hands, kissed, but we didn’t take the plunge. We were too damaged. And then one day I said to him, ‘Do you know what I want? To spend the night in your arms.’

  He came over to my house. We didn’t even eat. We couldn’t wait. We were afraid too, of course. What remained on my skin of all that had been inflicted on me? Where was its trace, since it was not in my memory? Would Jean-Loup see it? Think about it? I sensed caution in him too. But my body yearned for the warmth of his embrace, transported me to some other place, did not remember. All the images, all the abuse, all the numbers that were now public knowledge, they had no place in my bedroom.

  That first night was gentle, punctuated by stifled giggles and a few furtive tears. I was seventy years old and had slept with no one but my husband and my erstwhile lover. Jean-Loup was the third man in my life.

  We waited a while before I stayed over at his house, where he had planned to live with his wife in their old age. There was a photograph of her in the living room. I didn’t want him to take it down. I liked listening to him talk about her. I felt real affection for this man, who had taken such good care of his wife until she was so cruelly taken from him. He seemed to have emerged from a place far from this island where we had met: from a formative scene of my childhood, the source of my deepest pain. That is how I fell in love with Jean-Loup.

  But soon afterwards he began having panic attacks and developing allergies. ‘I feel like I’m cheating on Bénédicte,’ he said. I suggested we take a break from seeing each other. I know how hard it is to let go of the dead. ‘No,’ he responded instantly. ‘You mean so much to me.’

  We talked a lot, but actually saying the words ‘I love you’ was very difficult. By some quirk of fate, he also had a little bulldog. Together we went for long walks. His dog was younger and a bit madcap; mine was slower and better behaved. I enjoyed hearing him reminisce. As a steward and then a purser for Air France he had been all over the world. He’d even flown on Concorde. His tales broadened my horizons. His children had followed similar paths: his son, Victor, was a pilot, his daughter, Mathilde, a flight attendant. They came to visit when they weren’t flying. During those times, I always made myself scarce. He didn’t need to ask. I was only too aware of how my presence might upset them, when they were still seeking echoes of their mother in their father’s company. Jean-Loup would call me the minute they left. There was something amusing, even a bit thrilling, in the way we kept our relationship secret, as if we were teenagers and our lives were just beginning. It couldn’t last, but those feelings brought us closer. All over the island hollyhocks were growing up through the earth and the cracks in the pavements, reaching towards the sky with the same thirst for life as us.

  That summer David and Céline decided to come and spend a couple of weeks on the island with their children. I was delighted. I missed them all so much. I couldn’t put them up in my little house, but I found them a caravan in a beautiful campsite nearby. I hoped that their holiday would help us rediscover the joy of being together, despite all the pain. And that is what happened.

  One evening I mentioned Jean-Loup. My son was ecstatic. He called his sister, who was just around the corner in her house. ‘Come and see Maman, she’s got something to tell you.’ Over she came. I don’t think she was expecting the announcement. ‘I’ve met someone,’ I said. She was overjoyed as well, and wanted to be introduced to him immediately. I was so relieved. Jean-Loup didn’t live far away – not that anyone is ever far away on the island. He came straight over, and she asked him a barrage of questions. It felt as if everything was suddenly resolved; Jean-Loup was the saviour, filling the empty space at their mother’s side, the abyss into which their father had dragged us all.

  I savoured every moment of that summer. But when, in November 2023, I saw photographs of my and Dominique’s second wedding in Paris Match, I understood that the demolition process wasn’t over yet. There I was, my face blurred out, on the arm of Dominique – whose face was not – wearing the elegant flowery dress that had been specially made for me by a local seamstress. Forced into the limelight, plastered over every newspaper kiosk in France.

  I knew who had given the pictures to the magazine. It was Joël, who had married us that day. He was interviewed in the article, calling himself Thierry. I was still Françoise. Only Dominique was Dominique P. His elder brother recounted their happy childhood, describing how they roamed freely in the great outdoors, built huts and fished for frogs. ‘I’ve tried to work out what the trigger was that might explain everything, but I can’t. Nothing strikes me as unusual about our childhood. We shared a bedroom for fifteen years, we even slept in the same little bed for a long time,’ he told the journalist.

  I felt sick. There was no mention of their father’s violence and perverted behaviour, their mother’s endless tears, Dominique’s lonely childhood caught between them, all the things that were so obvious the first time I entered the Pelicot house. Joël had always defended his father. He liked to say that if he were ever to travel around the world it would be with him. And now he was publicly heaping blame on his brother as a way of protecting his father again. He could have kept his mouth shut but he felt some need to add his voice to those of the prosecutors. I suppose he thought that this way he would protect his own reputation too. At the end of the article, he said that Dominique had turned into a guy full of hang-ups, who lived beyond his means and had failed to repay any of the large sums of money Joël had lent him over the years.

  I closed the wretched magazine. I knew what this meant. The date of the trial had still not been fixed, but it would definitely take place sometime during the next year. My lawyers were working very hard preparing for it. They had met my oldest friends and talked to them about Dominique; they understood that they were going to have to listen to all the memories, even the good ones, if they were to truly understand our relationship. This mattered a lot to me. They had combed through the case file, all the rapists’ confessions and denials. They and their colleagues had pored over every minute of the videos, even though it was traumatising and kept many of them from sleeping at night. But, as they told me, it was extremely rare to have such powerful evidence in a rape case. I still refused to watch them.

  I couldn’t wait for Christmas. Jean-Loup and I were going to stay with David and Céline. Caroline and Pierre would be there too. What I wished for more than anything was simply to be in a place where my life could begin again, with all the little things that matter most. As if we might one day be freed.

  But I was trapped in the harsh, blinding light of the films and images I tried to flee, while the rest of the family were suffocating in the shadow and fog into which the revelations had plunged them. We couldn’t follow the same path to pull ourselves through. That is no doubt why our wounds did not bring us closer, and why, during the time we spent together, David and Céline never told me about the complaint for sexual assault that Nathan had filed against Dominique in July 2023, just before they joined us on the Ile de Ré. David only told me much later. I felt a dull explosion inside me – another one. I remembered only a present and loving grandfather. For four years, horrible accounts had been falling on me one after the other.

  So I placed my hopes in the justice system. I had never asked for anything else – only that it continue its investigation, that it dig, that it give us all some answers. The trial was approaching. Caroline, in turn, was having difficulties with our first lawyer, so I asked Stéphane and Antoine if they could represent her; I wanted her to be well supported. They made contact quickly. It was a way of preparing to face the court together. The date of the first hearing was set for September 2nd.

  Time now felt like a countdown.

  I wished I could disappear. I wished I didn’t have to see or be seen. I wished I could let my lawyers get on with their job and talk on my behalf when the day arrived, behind the doors of a closed hearing. I wished I could send a body double, or at least only a part of me, the part I had not immediately recognised in the pictures that Deputy Sergeant Perret had shown me back in November 2020; the woman known in the media as Françoise. I wished for the whole thing to be over and done with, so I could be left in peace, far from the noise, the crowds, the rumours, the spotlight. I wished for Dominique to spend the rest of his life in prison, and that after the trial none of the others would be released either.

  Fifteen

  The trial, set to begin in Avignon in the autumn, was fast approaching. I thought about it all the time. My two lawyers and I were busy preparing for it. I always referred to them now as ‘the boys’, an affectionate term that reflected how important they were in my life. They were still unfailingly tactful and reserved with me. In that respect, we were all very much alike.

  Stéphane and Antoine had requested that I read the writ of indictment in its entirety. Four hundred pages. A full account of everything I had discovered and been told over the last few years. This time it was not going to be possible to take in the facts bit by bit, as I had always insisted on doing. I was going to have to read it all in one go, the detailed descriptions of how my husband and dozens of strangers had raped me over the course of ten years. Jean-Loup printed the whole thing out for me – I didn’t want to read it on a computer screen. I wanted to be able to go through the big sheaf of pages alone, curled up inside or out in a comfortable chair. The account began with a long list of the accused. Their names, occupations, addresses. I highlighted their dates of birth. 1997…1988…I was born in 1952. Their youth was baffling, and made it all the more appalling. Then, for each one, the facts. Abhorrent, unspeakably cruel. And entirely absent from my memory, so distant from anything I could imagine, almost unreal, despite being written down in black and white in language that managed to be both vulgar and official. And present throughout, this inert woman, whom they manhandled and dared to describe as consenting.

  My stomach tightened. I had to keep putting the pages down to catch my breath. The dates were particularly distressing. I could picture where we were, what had happened before and afterwards, what we were doing then in our lives, what I thought was happiness. That was my birthday. That was the New Year’s Eve we’d decided for once to stay in, just the two of us, after the children had gone home. Jean-Loup was reading the pages at the same time. It didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. ‘How on earth did your body tolerate all this?’ he asked me once or twice. Being asked this unanswerable question felt like plunging straight into the horror of what had happened, while at the same time watching it drift away and hearing myself say I had survived. I realised I was ready. Antoine and Stéphane didn’t conceal from me the aspect of the trial that was extremely unusual for them too: the fact that there were fifty-one defendants. A pack of rapists. Fifty strangers and the man who was once my husband.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was impatient to see Dominique in court. The others I feared because of how many they were. I found myself worrying more and more about the closed door of the courtroom, which was supposed to protect me from the prying eyes of the public and the media. I was beginning to realise that a closed hearing meant I would be alone with them. Locked in with them. It was a vague sense I had, difficult to formulate in words. I hadn’t discussed it with anyone, but as the trial drew near I kept imagining myself hostage to their gaze, their lies, their cowardice and their contempt. The charges against them were overwhelming, the evidence unprecedented, but the fact remained that there would be fifty-one men gathered in the courtroom. Their voices would be louder than mine. And all their eyes would be on me as they stood shoulder to shoulder, like a wall.

  Maybe I was handing them a gift. Maybe I was actually protecting them by asking for the trial to be held behind closed doors. No one would ever know what they had done to me. There would be no journalists present to say their names and describe their crimes. No one beyond those involved in the trial would see their faces, look them up and down and wonder how to pick out the rapists among their neighbours and colleagues, though apparently it is so very easy to recruit them. Perhaps most importantly of all, no woman would be able to enter the courtroom and feel a little less alone; if I hadn’t noticed anything, it must surely have happened to others. Apart from the judges, there would be only me, my children and my lawyers, Antoine and Stéphane, facing a horde of men and their forty-five defence lawyers.

  I had ardently wanted a closed hearing. I had said it again to the magistrate a few months earlier. It was so clear to me that I hadn’t even discussed it with my lawyers. When my previous lawyer had originally suggested having an open hearing as a way of staging a massive public trial of violence against women, I had categorically refused. I did not wish to have my relationship with Dominique exposed to the eyes of the world. I believed that justice must be done but I did not want to be in the spotlight, forever the victim, ‘that poor woman’ – she wasn’t me, and she wasn’t the person I wanted to be.

  But then, one day in May, I changed my mind. I was walking alone through the forest with the intention of coming back along the beach. The more I walked, the more my doubts grew. If Dominique had been alone in the dock, I would have felt there was no alternative to a closed hearing, but now? A flood of questions filled my head, a strange blend of dread, anger and confidence too, for I was stronger now, no longer the person who had lost everything.

  Jean-Loup and I were living together now. The path I was following led back to his house – our house. Just a few months earlier, I was still trying to keep out of the way as much as possible when his children came to visit. On the night of his son’s thirtieth birthday, for example, I had planned to spend the evening alone in my little house, until Victor phoned and asked me to join them. He wanted me there.

  Most importantly of all, I had my own children back. The summer we had spent together, followed by Christmas and New Year, seemed to have brought us closer. My family was healing. I was happy that we were speaking on the phone more often. I kept up to date with their news, heard the voices of my grandchildren whom I had missed so much. We were each privately dealing with the trial of the father and husband in our own way, but we would be in court together, to seek, if not meaning in all that had happened to us, at least some kind of closure.

  I arrived at the beach. The sea air was brisk, it filled my lungs, I felt exposed to the elements, small but utterly alive. I had the physical sensation that I needed the rest of the world. I didn’t want to be alone any more. So many strangers had shown me such kindness, made me feel welcome when I had nothing left. I wasn’t scared of being seen now, of people knowing. Shame has to change sides. The words I’d first heard over a decade ago, a slogan supporting women who had survived rape and domestic violence, came into my head like a refrain, as if tiny blades were honing my thoughts. Everyone needs to see the faces of the fifty-one rapists. They should be the ones to hang their heads in shame, not me. I climbed the dune to a small promontory where the coastal path starts getting steeper, marking the end of my walk and the turning towards Jean-Loup’s house. But at the top of the hill I stopped for a moment and gazed into the distance where the sky meets the sea. I knew then that the door to the courtroom had to be opened.