The Hermitage

After you left…After you left, I often thought I saw you coming down a street, sitting on the terrace of a cafe, a silhouette, a gesture, that strange sway of the shoulders, out of step, that you had when you walked. It could not be you. Each time, a jolt in my chest, the heart tightening up, it seems, just before it collapses. It was never you. Published in France in 1986, The Hermitage is a compelling and heartbreaking soliloquy, a farewell to a lover long gone and to the self-imposed exile undertaken by the woman he left behind. The narrator, looking back over the ten years she has spent as a recluse, spends one final night pouring out her feelings of tragedy and loss. During the night she will toss off her old identity and then step out into a new one - more redemptive, more hopeful - with the rise of the sun. She will pass through an open door,
cured
of this lover but not of love, her fate unknown but finally her own. Marie Bronsard’s language expresses tragic loss with an austerity reminiscent of Duras and Ernaux. The Hermitage is for anyone ever tempted to write that last unwritten letter.