1911 - After Montjoie I - Claire : The Martijouet

In the wake of Montjoie, Claire has returned to her life, her classes, her outings, her habits. On the surface, nothing has changed. And yet what once sufficed — seducing, observing, directing — no longer does. Desire has remained, but shifted, as though her body were now waiting for something other than a well-conducted conquest.

It is this precise lack that drives her, one evening in January 1911, to return alone to L’Entrechattes, a place too showy, too coded, too theatrical for her taste — or so, at least, she had wanted to believe. There she meets Aline and Ghislaine, two women as playful as they are exacting, who offer her less an adventure than a frame, less a seduction than a lesson.

In a hotel room, between humour, rule, trouble and surrender, Claire discovers that there is sometimes a truth of the body no intelligence can replace: the one that begins at last when one stops trying to hold everything.

Translated from French by Ysis