A few minutes later, we were sitting side by side. She began by telling me what she’d found out. Her first words were: ‘He’s homosexual.’ I said nothing for a moment; that possibility had crossed my mind. It seemed obvious now. Madeleine repeated several times that she had been blind. Maybe it was the times. The fact that she was fairly innocent about life. And Yves had never talked about it. Their sex life had seemed more than satisfying to her, but she had nothing to compare it to, no way of understanding a man’s feelings. So that was the reason for his discontent. He was happy with Madeleine, but he knew he was living a lie.

Yves had told her everything; he’d been totally frank, even at the risk of offending her. He even admitted that during their relationship he’d had affairs with men. Often they were married men, fathers. Yves had imagined that, like them, he’d be able to lead a sort of double life. Particularly since he had very deep feelings for Madeleine. He thought he could have a classic married life, and a gay sex life in parallel. That was why he’d agreed to marry her. But something had held him back from following this path. He couldn’t base his existence on a lie, couldn’t betray the woman he loved. Several times, he’d tried to tell her about it, but the words had refused to emerge from his mouth. Towards the end of their affair, he’d fallen ill. Madeleine had forgotten that episode, having shrouded the entire period in a kind of mental fog. But Yves had been bedridden for several weeks with a fever, his body poisoned by the truth he couldn’t reveal.

He had to get away. Of course, he knew that Madeleine would be devastated, just as he himself was. And he knew how awful it was to leave her without any explanation for his departure. But the confession would not come out. He was afraid that, if he told her everything, she would regard their love as a farce. By keeping silent, he believed he could preserve the beauty of what they’d shared. But, in fact, he’d done something much worse by abandoning her in silence. He had made her so miserable that she’d wanted to kill herself. He realised that now, but he begged her to understand that it had been impossible for him to act in any other way. So they had embraced, before signalling to me that it was time to join them.

I was deeply moved by the calm way Madeleine told me all this. She was relieved to finally be able to put into words the abandonment that had haunted her throughout her life. Yves had wanted to tell her the truth when he returned to Paris, years later, but she’d refused to see him. So she had missed the chance to hear his explanation. Madeleine needed time to digest what she’d heard, but it was clear that she and Yves were happy to be reunited; happy and stunned by this strange twist of fate.