I still wished I could speak to the man sitting across from me in the courtroom. We had spent a lifetime together, but all I had left of him by this stage were his confessions, his eyes avoiding the images that still excited him even now, and a faint hope for the rehabilitative therapy he’d started in prison.

  Had that man ever really existed?

  That was one of the central questions of this trial. An essential one for me. We are made up of our memories. And neither the four years that had gone by nor the scale of the barbarity revealed to me had erased mine. What was I to do with them? What meaning should I give them? During the first few days in court, I watched my children enter the witness box and pour out their rage and sorrow. It tore me apart. I felt keenly how alone we were, how difficult it was going to be for us to heal. Contrary to what people might think, unhappiness does not bring people together. Dominique had devastated us all, isolated and propelled us away from each other. My heart tightened as I listened to David talk about the relationship he had once had with his father, all the good times they’d shared, and now his profound sense of betrayal and disgust; to Caroline, as she portrayed an affectionate father, a considerate man she had felt very close to, then declared that he was nothing more to her now than the worst sexual predator of the last twenty years; and to Florian, almost hoping publicly that he was someone else’s son, that he didn’t have the same blood in his veins as his mother’s tormentor, that he didn’t carry the same genes as the worst of men.

  The expert witnesses were then called to give evidence. That day in September had been scheduled to deal solely with Dominique. However, he only appeared for a few minutes at the beginning of the session – just long enough for his lawyer to explain that he needed to go to the hospital to have his kidney stones treated. He vanished, as if he preferred to be absent when we were talking about him. My lawyers asked the psychiatrists the question that had been haunting me: ‘What kind of personality allows someone who claims he loves his wife to inflict these scenes on her, to participate in her debasement, to put her in danger? How can this unfathomable contradiction exist in one man?’

  The psychiatrist Paul Bensussan, who had conducted a lengthy evaluation of Dominique, spoke of a man split in two. He explained that different and opposing personalities can coexist inside one individual – one personality connected to reality, the other to his fantasies. Like day and night, I thought. ‘He may have been sincere in how he presented himself,’ he added.

  Sincere. I clung to that word. It let me keep part of my life, as if it gave a little credit to my memories.

  As Dr Bensussan continued with his report, he described a man completely lacking in empathy, a narcissist who had developed virtually every form of sexual paraphilia: a taste for dominant–submissive relationships, voyeurism, sadism, necrophilia, fetishism, and candaulism as well – the practice of achieving arousal through watching or exhibiting images of one’s partner having sex with another. He added that the split in Dominique’s personality was so pronounced that any kind of authentic introspection would be difficult for him.

  What did this clinical assessment leave me of the man I had known? Had he died long ago? And if so, when? After ten, twenty or thirty years of marriage? Had he ever in fact existed? Those were the questions this trial kept whispering to me.

  Sometimes I switched off and let the experts’ words rise and float away in the courtroom. It was humiliating to listen to their dissections of my life, my mind and my body. As the proceedings went on and one after the other medical and psychological experts gave evidence, I heard discussions of my age, of women of my generation, of my average IQ, of the number of my orgasms; I heard detailed descriptions of each of my orifices, its colour and secretions, as if I were laid out before the whole assembly, as well as appearing naked and unconscious on the screens. Paul Bensussan talked about ‘the wife’ and her ‘unimaginable blindness’. Which shouldn’t be taken as a sign of guilt, he added, nor as evidence of complicity, as some of the defence counsel suggested. ‘In a way, the other person can split along with the splitter,’ he concluded. What was that supposed to mean? That I had been blind to the alarming signals that Dominique and his dangerous double personality must have displayed? That I’d been incapable of protecting myself and my children?

  * * *

  • • •

  From where I was sitting, I would often observe the women accompanying the defendants – mostly their partners, wives or exes, but sometimes their mothers or sisters too. These women were suffering. I could sense their fragility, the violence inflicted on them. They were prisoners in a room where the judges demanded that they reveal everything about their private lives, under the watchful eyes of the accused insisting on their unfailing support. One mother said no, my son is incapable of doing such a thing. She was about to be subjected to a video of her child raping a woman her own age. She chose to leave the courtroom, as all the women did. They all left. None of them wanted to be confronted with those images, to be forced to watch their loved one as he was committing rape. One wife talked about how when her mother was ill, she refused to have sex with her husband, and said that ‘as a man, he had to go looking elsewhere for it’.

  I asked my lawyers to say something to her, so she wouldn’t be left feeling that it might have been her fault. ‘Madame Pelicot would like you to know that she believes you hold no responsibility whatsoever for what your husband has done,’ Stéphane said. I could have been that woman.

  I had felt so guilty after my affair – that phase of my life that was exhaustively analysed in court as a possible turning point for Dominique – so guilty about causing him pain. And I’d given him the freedom to have affairs of his own afterwards, convinced that I was in the wrong and that he deserved sexual partners who were more liberated. I knew what that woman was going through. I had been that woman, who placed her man’s satisfaction before her own. I’d forgotten the new sensations, the pleasure that I’d found in my escapade with Didier, the feeling that I could at last let myself go in his arms. There was never any future for Didier and me, but simply less tension – the tension Dominique instilled in all our sexual relations, in which I was constantly forced to set boundaries.

  I had never questioned those boundaries; I had let him transform them into grievances. According to him, my limitations, my blockages and my prudish nature meant I couldn’t give him everything he wanted. I had never allowed myself to examine what frightened me: was it sexuality or was it him? Even when Dominique was arrested, the terror I felt at the discovery of what he’d done hadn’t prevented me from feeling the familiar guilt rise up inside me again. What could I have done differently to help him overcome his demons? But that was all over now. It was not my fault, and it never had been. I now understood what kind of serious pathology I had been wedded to. These four long years had helped. My new life, my relationship with Jean-Loup, had too.

  I was no longer afraid.

  * * *

  • • •

  But the fact remained that the procession of women who came to give evidence held up a mirror to the person I had once been. It reflected nothing more than the inner conflict we all feel, the wars we wage against ourselves. When their partners had been arrested, the police had offered to test the women’s hair, concerned that they might have been victims of the same practices as I was. All of them refused. Never, that was impossible. They all trusted their men. Despite the fact that Dominique loved to convert others to his modus operandi.

  That was how Madame Maréchal was drugged and raped by both her husband and mine approximately ten times. In the witness box, she spoke about how she had believed she was happy, just as I had; she talked about their modest and fulfilling family life with five children, and then about the day when she woke up to find Dominique in her bed. He had escaped through the window. Monsieur Maréchal had blathered some story about allowing a voyeur who liked underwear into the house, but Dominique had in fact come to rape her.

  I wasn’t in court the day she took the stand, because her husband hadn’t assaulted me, and I wasn’t entirely tied to that part of the case. My lawyers, worried to see me already so tense and exhausted barely into the second week of this marathon trial, had told me my presence wasn’t essential and advised me to take a few hours to breathe and rest. So I hadn’t heard her testimony. I regret that, because this woman had been raped by my husband. She didn’t press charges against either him or her own husband. The next day, I was cross-examined about my lack of reaction to these revelations by the defence, who were always eager to prove my duplicity or my weakness towards Dominique. I replied that Madame Maréchal was within her rights to act as she saw fit, that it wasn’t for me to judge her. And when Monsieur Maréchal’s family came to give evidence and talked about his childhood – how he was forced as a boy to watch his father and other men rape his mother, how he was tied to a tree and beaten, how he was regularly subjected to corporal punishment, how he saw his father leering at his sisters and how he performed fellatio on his father in order to protect them – I felt once again that I could have been Madame Maréchal.

  * * *

  • • •

  ‘I’m no worse than my father,’ Dominique said one day, about a month into the trial. I had been expecting to hear that. It was not minimising his crimes to see them as an echo of his childhood – the shadow of his tyrannical father, the constant tears of his mother. It was not beside the point to remember that young Nicole had been abused, or that his half-sister, Geneviève, had been so harassed that she had chosen to leave home at seventeen. Geneviève came in person to give evidence. Over eighty years old, frail and breathless, she told the court how her stepfather, Denis, had terrified her. But then it was Joël’s turn to testify. He made his entrance into the courtroom with all the poise of a local dignitary. He acknowledged that Denis had raped Nicole, but according to him this was a trivial detail, an unremarkable occurrence, the fate of countless girls who were wards of the state and caught in similar traps.

  No, he said, his father was a decent man. His half-sister was making things up. Likewise, he asserted that Dominique had concocted the story about being raped by a male nurse when he was eight. Joël recounted the episode as if it had happened only yesterday. The day his brother came home from the hospital, their father had shown the family the Formica table and chairs he’d just bought, and told young Dominique he would only be getting the stool, given what he’d cost them in medical expenses. According to Joël, Dominique then revealed what the nurse had done during the night on the general ward. Their parents had called the hospital, who denied any wrongdoing. Joël told the court that he believed his brother had been a compulsive liar since his early childhood.

  Dominique raged from his glass box. ‘Our parents never knew what happened! I never said a word to anyone about it when I came home. There was no way I could talk about it…Our father was the first to wreck the family. As for me, I accept what I did and will pay for it. But our father never paid the price for what he did.’

  I was restless in my seat. The state prosecutor, who was sitting close to me, said, ‘I sensed you were upset when your brother-in-law gave evidence.’

  ‘Yes, I was. He was lying.’

  I had a clear memory of that Formica furniture; it was still in their kitchen when I became part of the family. I remembered Dominique’s mother sitting slumped on one of the chairs, as he begged her to leave his father. And this courtroom was where all that violence was culminating, where that chain of fear had led. The man who had seen those horrors, denounced them, and even fled them, carried them within him more than anyone else – and had become a criminal. He had far surpassed his father’s horrors.

  For fifty years, I had believed the exact opposite: that we were saved, that we had a good life. I was wrong. And now I was attending the autopsy of our relationship in the large courtroom of the Palais de Justice in Avignon. ‘When Dominique Pelicot met his wife, she didn’t heal him, she reconciled him with himself,’ his lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, said. Though she was representing Dominique, she was extremely gracious to me throughout the trial.

  Sometimes Dominique made discreet signs to me from his box. He put his hand over his heart. I did not respond. Was that the gesture of the man I had once thought I knew? I let him fall into the void he had hurled us all into. I was under fire from the defence lawyers who accused me of supporting and protecting Monsieur Pelicot. One, a woman, said that I was always staring at him, another added that I was ‘not being transparent’. But I was absolutely not protecting Dominique. His fate was cast, he could not commit any more crimes – not against me, or anyone else.

  I was simply protecting our memories, parts of our life, our story. Sometimes, after a house fire, a few walls are left standing; though blackened and burnt they are still there, perhaps showing the outline of an old staircase, a pattern of wallpaper that needed changing, or a trace of footsteps and moments of togetherness. That was how it appeared to me in my mind; I was looking for a few relics among the ashes. I couldn’t face losing everything. I was fighting to keep those walls standing, to stay upright myself. If the last fifty years of my life were taken away from me, it would be as if I had never existed. I would be dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  Among the ruins of our life, there were those two photographs of Caroline asleep, taken without her knowledge or consent. She spoke about them when she first addressed the court, about how afraid she was that she’d been drugged and raped too. There were also the nauseating montages of my daughters-in-law in the shower, taken with a pen camera hidden in the bathroom. Dominique had cut the pictures up and used the bodies, pasting the images between two men or under a photograph of his own erect penis. His abhorrent fantasies had crept into every room in our house.

  The psychiatrist explained that the love Dominique Pelicot felt for his family was not, in itself, a sufficient barrier to rule anything out. He raised the question of incest, which seemed to leach out from the images and photomontages Dominique had made. The question lingered throughout the trial. It was not the matter at hand but we were still hoping for answers. In that solemn legal setting, we laid bare all our wounds and what was left of our lives. Caroline repeatedly telephoned the lawyers, both ours and her father’s, begging them time and again to ask the question, because she was sure that her father would end up cracking. Our house was still burning.

  Antoine, who was representing Caroline and Florian, asked Dominique, ‘Why can’t you at least admit to having once looked at your daughter in an incestuous way? This is starting to be too much for her to bear…’ Dominique persisted in saying no, against all the evidence of the photographs and montages. He continued denying that he had taken the photographs, even though they had been stored in a file on his hard drive.

  ‘I never looked at her like that,’ he kept repeating. His lawyer solemnly asked him whether he had ever felt the slightest temptation to touch his children or his grandchildren. Dominique, his voice choking, swore he had never put his grandchildren in danger, and, turning to Caroline, said, ‘Caroline, I never touched you. I never drugged or raped you. You can’t say that. It’s impossible, I never did that.’

  She was sitting beside me that day. I wasn’t asking her to believe her father. How could she? He had told us so many lies. And if I still sometimes tried to find, in the split man the psychiatrists had described, the man who loved his children, Caroline had no reason to do the same. But I was at least hoping that she would hear and take to heart what the examining magistrate, Gwenola Journot, had said when she declared to the court that her investigation of the possibility that Caroline had been raped by her father had reached a dead end. There was no further evidence to support the allegation: no other images, no videos, no messages. Caroline didn’t have any physical symptoms or hazy memories of ever having been sedated. There was no time when she had been alone with her father. There were just those disgusting images of her that had become an obsession for us all.

  We did not discuss the magistrate’s statement afterwards. We couldn’t. Caroline was constantly losing her temper with the lawyers, with Jean-Loup, with her husband. This trial could not ease her pain, nor dissipate our doubts, nor answer the questions that were torturing us all. Worse still, it risked putting even more distance between us, for the judges were focusing only on the facts and evidence in the case being prosecuted, and therefore on my ordeal, leaving Caroline with the sense that she was being overlooked. ‘My mother was raped, yes, under the influence of drugs, yes. The only difference between my mother and me is that in her case there is proof. For me, it’s an absolute tragedy,’ Caroline said in court. That ‘yes’ she repeated felt like a blade to me; she was cutting her pain from mine, setting the two in opposition. I had no idea how to respond or how to reassure her, since reassuring her now meant betraying her.

  I wanted the truth, the whole truth. I wasn’t trying to save appearances, nor spare the wife and mother I had been, that woman who had seen nothing, who either had not been able to protect her family or hadn’t known how to. That wife and mother was lying almost dead on the three screens in front of us, and on another in the room next door – an additional space open to the public, barred to minors, and where the faint of heart were advised to leave. I was wrung out. I occasionally put on my sunglasses inside the courtroom to hide my tears. What was happening in there was infinitely sad, while outside the court a strong and liberating wind was rising.