Once again he lived through the amazement, the denial, the suffering in Louise’s face; the rage during that brief period when her reaction had been violent; the horror he’d inspired in her, which she’d thrown back at him with ­desperate force; and then, acceptance, after battles of ­surprising brutality and arguments that went on forever. Acceptance, but not comprehension. He’d been unable to make his wife understand what was happening to him because he hadn’t really understood it himself, or hadn’t wanted to. Not right away, in any case.

For a while he’d thought it was a reaction to responsibilities too great for someone his age, to his refusal of the head-of-the-household straitjacket that had been thrust on him when the child—an accident—came too soon into his life; to the role in which he found himself frozen for the rest of his existence. But why men? Why not other women? And then old memories that had been buried, deliberately or not, resurfaced, clearer now, more obvious: troubles that had regularly cast him into melancholy during adolescence; hesitant reactions, incomprehensible at the time, to advances, whether timid or direct, that should have brought a more vigorous response; inexplicable crushes; images that had been rejected as soon as they occurred to him.

He also relived the pettiness of the incident that had ­started it all, the childish taste for revenge that he’d felt when he cheated on Louise, who had cheated on him first—and to make matters worse, with a guy he detested. Above all, the revelation in the face of what should always have been, and which was now happening too late. And was, ­fundamentally, so simple.

He’d even wondered if his true nature would ever have shown itself if Louise hadn’t cheated on him, or if he ­hadn’t found out. Then he had to acknowledge that it was just a pretext, his wounded pride serving as a catalyst for something that eventually, inevitably, would have been revealed. The timing couldn’t have been worse, though, so soon after the birth of Sébastien, for whom Mathieu discovered an almost painful passion. He had lost at the same time the love and esteem of a woman he had deeply loved and his rights to a creature who was part of him, whom he’d ­created —somewhat unconsciously, granted—but who had quickly become his reason for living. His other reason for living, because his recent discovery had struck like lightning and he was giving himself over to it with the energy of despair. Mathieu remembered the period right after his separation as a kind of semi-hell in which he had revelled with an evil joy, a perverse masochism, an appetite for danger that astonished him.