The magistrate knew far more than I did anyway. The photographs and videos in her file had been classified, numbered and dated. All I had was the hazy memory of my blackouts, my concerned children and friends saying, ‘Don’t you remember our conversation?’ That is how I discovered that he had drugged me on October 3rd 2020 – after he was arrested for upskirting in the supermarket, after his confession, his weeping, his promises to me, his tears at the thought of losing me. And then again, on the 10th and then the 21st, the night I got back from Paris after I’d been looking after David’s children. I remember that day very clearly. Dominique came to pick me up at the station. We got back to the house at 4 p.m. and I was surprised to find dinner already in the oven. He had made mashed potatoes in two separate dishes, since he liked his with butter and I liked mine with olive oil and parsley. He had added lorazepam and zolpidem to mine. We ate early. I have no memory whatsoever of what happened after that. I realised in the magistrate’s office that the rapes had become more frequent in October. He must have known they would be his last; the police had seized his phone and computer, and he knew they would have found his photographs and videos. He knew that the moment he entered the police station on November 2nd he would not leave it as a free man. And I would never again be the plaything of his barbaric fantasies.

  ‘What was your sex life with Monsieur Pelicot like?’ the magistrate asked me. It had become a question I found difficult to answer. I had always thought we had a normal sex life, perhaps better than most couples our age. We still made love five or six times a month. It was mostly on his initiative. His sexual appetite had always been bigger than mine, but that fitted with the notion I had of men and women.

  He had changed a great deal over fifty years. The initial signs, I realise now, came with my pregnancies. A first pregnancy is an exhilarating and daunting adventure, and he was always by my side, considerate, overjoyed at the birth of David, who was born in a matter of minutes. He was just as happy during the second. He really wanted children. But one day he told me pregnant women aren’t pretty. I must have said something in reply, but what I remember is feeling the sting, or rather the chill, of a male gaze concerned only with his own desire. For my body was swelling, becoming more bestial. On the day of Caroline’s birth, my labour went on so long that Dominique had to go back to work. Epidurals were uncommon at the time, and I didn’t have one with either birth. I was left alone to endure the contractions that were ripping my pelvis apart. I was exhausted, mumbling about how afraid I was of dying, and then she arrived, a wonderful little baby girl, and all my fears evaporated.

  I loved breastfeeding my babies, bonding with them and being needed. I loved their smell, their softness. I loved covering them with kisses. I loved being a mother. I was emotional, overwhelmed, worn out, my body still aching from the delivery. I had no energy for anything apart from my daughter and her big brother.

  After the children were born Dominique became more insistent, as though seeing me monopolised by motherhood made him want to pull me back to him. He was impatient for our sex life to resume. The mother had taken his wife away from him.

  As my strength and desire slowly returned, Dominique suggested something new: fellatio. I was twenty-seven and had no idea what that was. I had grown up in a body I did not like, being constantly attacked by my stepmother for my appearance, and obviously I was never taught anything about sex. Like so many young women of my generation, I had rushed into marriage with the idea that love and family would save me, though I didn’t think of it in those terms at the time. They were beliefs inculcated in us so young that they governed the way we lived, insinuated themselves into our minds. Perhaps they ran even deeper in me; I was not looking for a conventional life, but for profound consolation. I married my first lover when he was an awkward and shy young man. Now he wanted fellatio. I started doing it. Was it to please him? Yes. But it didn’t feel like I was submitting to a demand. It felt like part of our evolving relationship, a way of keeping it alive and giving him pleasure, the same way we loved to laugh, dance, travel and live together. Then he began asking for more. ‘There’s a part of you I don’t possess,’ he said. He meant anal sex.

  ‘Never,’ I said. He didn’t insist. So I was able to refuse. He did not always get what he wanted.

  I also told him to throw away his sex toys, but he obviously didn’t, because the magistrate informed me that they’d been found by the police. Though I was taken aback by her youth I was reassured by the fact that she was a woman. Maybe, like everyone else, she thought I didn’t seem distressed enough, vindictive enough, angry enough. Maybe she found me naive. I told her that despite our various problems, I had always thought we were happy. ‘I was content with my simple little life.’ That’s how I put it. In my little life, there were highs and lows, and men who thought about sex more than women. It was a natural law as old as time. When my daughter-in-law Aurore, Florian’s partner, walked in on Dominique masturbating in his office, she confided her embarrassment to Florian, who in turn spoke to me about it. I immediately broached the subject with Dominique, and he replied, ‘All guys do it.’ I didn’t know what to say. I’m sure I would have been horrified at what he was looking at, but we didn’t know anything about that then and I only used the computer to do my accounts. I had no interest in the internet and social media, and I had no idea of the extent to which they had altered human relationships. In my little life, I always thought that a dangerous man was by definition aggressive, which Dominique wasn’t.

  It’s true that over the previous few months, maybe even the previous few years, our sex life had become less tender. He always preferred to penetrate me from behind, not to meet my eyes. What was that about? Regret? Shame? What was he thinking of when he looked at me? Us? His fantasies? He once suggested I have a Brazilian wax, which I also refused.

  ‘What are your feelings today about Dominique Pelicot?’ asked the examining magistrate.

  ‘He disgusts me, I feel dirty, soiled, betrayed.’

  These are the words that appear in the interview transcript. My faltering and hesitations have been cut. Justice needs to keep moving along. Sometimes I call him ‘my husband’ and immediately correct myself, and say ‘he’ as Caroline does. Or ‘Monsieur’, as though speaking of a stranger. In one instance, it is noted that I am crying. That is the moment I tell the magistrate I have lost everything. It is the desolation, the collapse, the arrival at the Gare de Lyon that bring me to tears, not what all those men did to me. I don’t remember anything about that. The magistrate asked me if I wanted to see some of the videos. I categorically refused. Over the past few weeks, I had been spending an absurd amount of time in the shower, obsessively washing myself, scrubbing myself clean of the filth of all those men who had raped a dead woman. That was the impression I had got from the few photographs I had seen: sleep and death conflated.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few days later, I had an appointment at the forensic medicine unit in Versailles. My body was a piece of evidence. Anne Martinat Sainte-Beuve, the medical examiner, told me that analysis of my hair had revealed traces of drugs despite the fact that I had been dyeing it regularly for years. This was evidence of extremely high levels of intoxication. She asked me a series of questions about the regularity and intensity of my blackouts. I answered calmly. I was feeling much better. I was no longer having blackouts, which meant that my condition was reversible, and proof that if I stayed away from him, I would be fine.

  I already knew that, but had no idea how to interpret it all. Dominique had always made sure to do that for me. He often said that I had given so much to the children that my exhausted body couldn’t help decompressing when I got home. His brother, Joël – a doctor, no less – agreed. ‘The brain knows best. It’s like how the vacuum cleaner switches off when the bag is full,’ he said when I told him about my blackouts. Let’s not dwell on the comparison between a woman’s brain and a vacuum cleaner bag. I’d known Dominique’s family long enough not to be offended. Joël’s vulgarity only emphasised his brother’s tenderness, which was how I had always thought of him, and was what made him so different from all the other Pelicot men. I still believed this was true of Dominique when he started accompanying me to the doctor. He was the one who made the appointments. He wanted to reassure me. I hadn’t realised the way he controlled my emotions, the way he’d give the answer to a question that I had not even thought of asking. The way he somehow ensured that I brought up my health concerns as rarely as possible with my daughter and sons. ‘You don’t want to worry them,’ he would say. How did I persist in seeing kindness where there was nothing but manipulation?

  It was not until around 9 p.m. that I at last entered the gynaecological examination room. It was late for us both, the doctor and me. She was having trouble attaching the stirrups to the examination table. When she finally succeeded, I slipped my feet into them, as all women have done at least once in their lives. Our bare feet on cold metal, our bare buttocks on the edge of the table, our legs spread to reveal that part of our bodies that we ourselves never see. I have done so many of these examinations over the last few years, at an age when in theory a woman has fewer reasons to see a gynaecologist. No more need for contraception, no more children to look forward to. Just a waning libido, the aches and pains of a body that is drying up, and the need to keep an eye out for cancer.

  The first speculum hurt. She went to look for a smaller one. She couldn’t see any tearing. On top of the sleeping pills, Dominique always gave me a powerful muscle relaxant so my body slackened and dilated, which is why I never felt any pain the following day. This was something she asked me about, as so many other women later would similarly wonder when they heard my story. At this point, my children and I were the only ones grappling with that question.

  The many doctors I had consulted up until then had never taken the kind of swabs she did. Nor had they ever thought to check for STDs. I had been treated for an inflamed cervix and instructed to stop having sex once and for all. These new tests revealed the presence of countless bacteria and of a papillomavirus that would need to be monitored, because it could develop into cancer. I was prescribed powerful antibiotics. As far as everything else was concerned, I did not have Alzheimer’s and I did not have a brain tumour like my mother. Life was sending me contradictory messages: my entire life had fallen apart, but I was fine.

  * * *

  • • •

  I gave notice to my landlady for the middle of February. The next thing was to empty the house. Florian was going to take the leather couch, the bicycle and the scooter. It made sense to give him these things because he was also in the throes of moving. He rented a van and the two of us drove down to Mazan at the end of December. Inside the house, everything was just as we had left it a month earlier. I had to dig deep to summon the strength to walk through the rooms.

  After my mother’s death, all the furniture in our house had been draped in white sheets. In Mazan, whatever we didn’t keep would be sold off cheaply on the website Leboncoin. We took photos. We quoted very low prices so that everything would go quickly. Sylvie agreed to be there to open the front door to potential buyers. Double-door fridge: 80 euros. Induction hob: 40 euros. Bed: 80 euros – yes, the brand-new bed that belonged to Monsieur and Madame Pelicot, the bed of horrors. Is that where I had died?

  * * *

  • • •

  I put together a pile of things for Dominique. He hadn’t received anything since the small bag I had hastily packed at the request of the police for his time in custody. He was now incarcerated in the prison in Le Pontet, near Avignon. Winter was coming. I was worried about him being cold. I wanted to see him, to ask him all the questions that troubled me during the day and kept me awake at night, to talk about the sense of ruin and waste that haunted me. He was probably the only person who would understand. But for legal reasons I was not allowed to see him. I gathered items that he would need: a towel, pyjamas, a pair of shoes, socks, underwear, a jumper to keep him warm. I couldn’t find his contact lenses. I put everything in a rubbish bag, because I knew he was not allowed a suitcase. Florian came with me to Le Pontet to drop it off. When we arrived, the prison officer at the front desk told us that the bag was not regulation, and pointed us in the direction of a nearby shop where I could buy a soft shopping bag. It was emblazoned with patches from different countries around the world and closed with a large zip.

  I packed everything neatly inside and we headed back to the prison. We deposited the bag at the reception desk and left. We stood for a long time in front of the grey building, looking up at it and wondering if he was behind one of the windows, if he was watching us. We still felt very connected to him. At least I did.

  Seven

  When Dominique and I first began living together, it felt as if we had escaped our misfortune, left it all behind along with the chateaux and forests of the Indre, and the tears of Juliette, Dominique’s mother, who wept uncontrollably whenever we went to visit her. She dwelled incessantly on the past, on her long road as a Pelicot, the name I had just taken. I never saw her as anything other than a victim, a wife cowering in the background, terrified of her husband. I couldn’t discern the slightest trace of emotion or repressed dreams in this little woman who was barely five feet tall. She dyed her hair, but it didn’t soften the fatigue and resignation that marked her face. I felt centuries apart from her.

  Juliette was married to André, the eldest of the Pelicot brothers, until one day, out of the blue, he walked out on her, leaving her alone with no financial resources and two young children to care for. Denis, André’s youngest brother, set his sights on his forsaken sister-in-law. He was only seventeen. She was ten years his senior. She fell pregnant so quickly that the divorce had not yet been finalised, so Joël, their first son, was registered as André’s son. It was the law that a wife could only fall pregnant by her husband. It was like a bad omen presaging the chain of abuse from one brother to the next. Dominique was born four years later and formally recognised as the son of Denis and Juliette Pelicot.

  When I became part of the family, Juliette was still cleaning houses, having been a factory worker for Kodak before becoming an Avon Lady, selling cosmetics door-to-door. Denis Pelicot drove around in an Arthur Martin appliance repair truck and didn’t work very much. Some days he would park the truck and sit inside it all day reading a book from the library. He was always home early. His imposing stature, moustache and loud voice brought a chill into the house. He was all-powerful there. In the outside world he went from job to job, never committing or finding stability, and no one ever knew whether he had left or been fired.

  * * *

  • • •

  During the early years of their marriage, Denis Pelicot ran a small hotel and restaurant called La Croix Blanche in Mamers, a little town in the Sarthe. But the place was on its last legs, and after a few years he dragged his wife and children to the Indre, where they moved into a house in the grounds of the Château d’Oublaise. Another chateau, this one a huge, turreted castle that after World War Two had been turned into a retirement home for veterans of the armoured cavalry division. A lair for disabled ex-servicemen, deep in the forest. Later, severely wounded soldiers and ex-legionnaires from the colonial wars were housed there alongside WWII veterans. With time, peace and prosperity, the notion of disability was broadened, and veterans who had been in prison, or had mental health problems, or didn’t have two sous to rub together, or drank too much, were also given room and board. The Château d’Oublaise became a shelter for anyone who did not fit into a rapidly changing society. There were many such men, and the establishment grew so large that it was talked about on the radio. Dominique’s father first learned about the place when he heard the writer and radio presenter Pierre Bellemare discussing it. Apparently there was work to be had there. He must have sensed that there were vulnerable people and a domain over which he could rule. He applied and was taken on as warden.

  The family moved into a small house in the grounds. Dominique was seven. He spent a lot of time on his own. His older siblings, Geneviève and André, had already left home. Quite soon Joël started boarding at the Lycée Giraudoux in Châteauroux and only came home at weekends. Dominique was trapped with his mother and father, living amid the comings and goings of physically fragile or mentally disturbed men. He cycled a long way through the countryside to school in the nearest village. His classmates called him the kid from Oublaise. He became an outcast, ostracised for the theft of a sweet that had actually been stolen by the pharmacist’s son. After school he would go back to the chateau and play football for hours with his imaginary teammates. That was his escape. Football became his lifelong passion. We had a photograph at Mazan of him aged nine in a black jersey, shorts and studded boots. It must have been destroyed in the frenzy of my children’s rage. There in the woods, surrounded by all those lost souls, some part of him was shaped. He still had memories and childlike impressions that he used to tell me about. Like the evening he got lost in the forest on his way to fetch milk, or his fear on the stormy night when his parents were away and he sought refuge in the room of one of the residents of the chateau, even though he had been warned never to go anywhere near him. The man gave him some chocolate, and when his parents got back, Denis gave him hell. Denis Pelicot doled out discipline according to rules and whims that were his alone. He used corporal punishment. Of all the dangers that threatened Dominique, the most fearsome was his father.