An accident. The pain of Paul’s absence, of missing him. Marie chooses to cope on her own. It is the beginning of a kind of unmooring. But in her sudden solitude, Marie begins to look at things with a new, more sharply honed gaze, and to reconsider her life before, the choices and non-choices she made, the places she let herself be carried to just by going with the flow. Finding Paul’s private notebooks will shed light on a dark side of him that she hadn’t known about, revealing a man who was shackled by his family history, to which he didn’t have the key. For both Paul’s sake and her own, Marie needs to understand, to resolve the enigma. Her quest eventually takes her to Italy. There, the beauty, art, and landscapes are deeply affecting to her. In a state of extreme openness to the world, with her senses on fire, Marie truly lets herself both feel and be. Freed from all pressure, she soon makes a decision that will give her life new direction, and create the conditions for another mystery, another enigma. L’Évanouissement de Marie is a bewitching début novel; the story of an inner path in which the main character relieves herself of the ballast and issues (family, social pressure and more) that oppress us, to get closer to her true self.