“I always set the table for breakfast the night before. I put out coffee cups, plates, cutlery, napkins, pots of honey and jam. Almost as a way of reaching across the hours of darkness that I fear, of proclaiming the harmony of the day…. That evening, as usual, I got everything ready. Even Dominique’s clothes…. I put out a pair of bottle-green corduroy trousers and a pink Lacoste polo shirt the children had given him.”
Thus begins Gisèle Pelicot’s searing, unforgettable, and strangely beautiful memoir, with the peaceful, deliberate, quotidian details of her and her husband’s retirement in Mazan, a small town in the South of France. She and Dominique had met as teenagers, fallen head over heels, raised three kids, and lived what she considered to be an ordinary but loving existence. Both came from Dickensian backgrounds: poverty, neglect, early loss. Dominique had been physically and sexually abused—Gisèle would find this out later—but they made a successful working-class life together, with all that entails: raising their kids, surviving money troubles, changing homes, jobs. These were stresses she could handle.
“I am not a radical person,” she writes. “All I ever wanted was a conventional life.” She saw her marriage, even with its ups and downs, as the thing that rescued them both from their painful beginnings. She thought her husband was a devoted father and companion. She believed that they could get through anything together. A resolute positivist, Gisèle wanted fiercely to have a good life.
She thought she did. But for the last decade of her 50-year marriage, unbeknownst to her—because he was surreptitiously drugging her—Dominique had been sexually assaulting her unconscious body, repeatedly. He had also invited at least 53 other men whom he found on the Internet to come into their home so that these strangers, too, could rape her on their marital bed.
These gruesome details were revealed to Gisèle one morning in 2020, following the breakfast she describes so carefully preparing, when she accompanied her husband to the local police station. He had been accused two months earlier of “upskirting”—that is, taking pictures up women’s skirts or dresses—in a grocery store, while she was visiting her grandchildren in Paris. When she returned home from her travels, he confessed that he was indeed guilty and said he didn’t want to lose her. She told him that he needed to apologize to the women and go into therapy or she would leave. He promised he would never do it again. The police called her and set a date for a meeting with her and her husband, which Gisèle assumed to be a formality.
But when the couple arrived at the station on November 2, 2020, they were separated. An uncomfortable cop ushered Gisèle into an office, where she apologized profusely for her husband’s misbehavior. Then the cop began showing her pictures of a woman so slack, “so floppy … She looked like a rag doll.” A man was penetrating her from the back. “That’s you,” the officer said. “No,” she said. There were more pictures, with other men. She wondered if they had been Photoshopped. She didn’t recognize any of it, the men, her clothes, her body. Because of the narcotics her husband had slipped into her food and drink, she had no recollection of being violated. “If I had any memories of the ordeal,” she writes, “it probably would have killed me.”
A Hymn to Life challenges preconceived notions of “appropriate” responses to both sexual violence and disbelief. It tells the story of how a woman held two opposing truths in her hands—the peaceful existence she led by day and the horrifying violence she was unknowingly subjected to by night—in order to piece her shattered life back together in the face of one of the most heinous sexual-abuse cases in modern history. A harrowing read, it is also an unexpected testimony to the tricky nature of attachment. Gisèle was either unable or unwilling to let go of the tensile strength of love and shared experience she’d had in her marriage—even dropping off a bag of warm clothes for Dominique in prison during the winter because she worried that he might be cold.
Perhaps the effects of being put into a series of narcotized comas by her own husband, plus her innate optimism, allowed her to deflect the trauma of the police’s discovery and try to hold on to her once happy life. “If the last fifty years of my life were taken away from me, it would be as if I had never existed. I would be dead.” All too aware of the tendency of other people to judge her responses, she effectively counters the arguments that she was too weak, not vindictive enough, or somehow complicit in the trespasses made to her own body.
Over time, due to the staggering evidence against Dominique—he had kept meticulous records and videotaped each of the assaults—and the realization that his poisoning was behind the strange symptoms that had been sending her to doctors, Gisèle came to see her husband as a monster and divorced him.
The toll all this took on her adult children was devastating. Photographs of the daughter, Caroline Darian, partially-nude and asleep in underwear she did not recognize as her own, were eventually unearthed, and she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Also discovered were photos of the Pelicots’ two daughters-in-law taken without their knowledge, in differing stages of undress. Caroline, who published a book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, last year, thinks that she, too, was raped by her father. Her mother’s hope that Dominique’s claims of innocence in this regard were true caused an agonizing rift. In the years since Dominique’s crimes came to light, there have been suspicions that a grandchild was also abused, and one son’s marriage ended in divorce. It’s no wonder painful periods of estrangement and discord have haunted this horrifically wounded family, although all three of Gisèle’s children have supported her at various times and stood by her in court.
With a trial approaching, Gisèle had another epiphany during one of the long walks she took for solace, when an old slogan used by feminist activists came to mind: “Shame has to change sides.” In France, rape cases are typically heard behind closed doors to provide privacy for the victims, but Gisèle decided to waive her right to anonymity and to open the trial of her husband and his 50 co-defendants to the courtroom and the media. By allowing the public to see the illicit videos her husband had taken throughout her long ordeal, and stored for his own perverse pleasure, she made the appalling nature of the assaults undeniable. Shame would indeed switch sides.
In the end, Dominique pleaded guilty and received the maximum sentence of 20 years. The rest of the defendants, ranging in age from 26 to 74, were all convicted—though most had insisted on their innocence—and received sentences between 3 and 16 years.
Satisfied that the men who had raped her would go to prison, Gisèle felt her battle had been won. Clearly there was some relief in that, although there are obviously scars that will never heal.
She writes that, in the future, she wants to go see Dominique in prison, although many of the people around her discourage this. She has so many questions: “Was there not a single moment when you felt pity for me?” And: “Did you abuse our daughter? Did you commit the most abject crime of all?”
In the end, what is so moving about this frank, disturbing, at times perplexing, and deeply personal memoir is that, after all is said and done, the author finds the courage to invest in her own future, and even to trust again in a new male partner. “I am no longer the wife in shock at the police station and I am no longer the woman I was before I discovered Dominique’s true nature. I am moving forward.”
Helen Schulman is a New York City–based writer and professor. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, the short-story collection Fools for Love
