People were leaning forward, trying to figure out what they were seeing, because a woman who entered the courtroom in a discreet gray dress had disappeared through the bedroom door to reappear a few minutes later dressed in a black dress. The wrinkling of the jackets, the nervous sliding of the chairs, the low breath of the stupor that ran through the benches of the public… all this had gathered in a single electric voltage, so dense that it seemed to shrink the room.
In front of me, Alexander Delorme looked like a man to whom the ground had just been removed under the feet.
His mother, Patricia, who had laughed when Valerie had hit me in the hallway, kept her mouth half-open in a perfect circle of icy disbelief.
Valerie’s face had whitened in this almost powdery way that people have when arrogance leaves the body faster than blood can follow.
For a second suspended, all three forgot to play a role.
I laid both hands on the desk and observed the room with a controlled calm.
Not because I suddenly became the judge of their divorce in the sense that they had believed him at first.
And not because this audience had miraculously changed me into a magistrate out of nowhere.
The reality was drier, more procedural, and much more devastating to them.
The family judge who was seized of the divorce had been deported the same morning after the revelation of a conflict of interest related to a foundation of the Delorme group. At 8:12 a.m., the case had been temporarily linked to a special formation of the economic and financial pole of the Paris Court of Justice, already seized of a sealed procedure for embezzlement of assets, breach of trust, intimidation of a party and potential obstruction.
I wasn’t there as a wife.
I was not there as a victim.
I was there as the special rapporteur appointed to present and certify the consolidation file on behalf of the Financial Ethics Committee to which I had been appointed three months earlier under my professional name:
Camille Reynaud.
And in this room, apart from the clerk, the head of the agents, two representatives of the Bar Association and the president called to rule afterwards, no one knew that Camille Delorme and Camille Reynaud were one.
It was not magic.
It was law.
competence.
of the procedure.
And this very particular form of violence that represents, for some people, the fact of having underestimated the wrong woman at the wrong time.
The clerk rose first, visibly anxious to restore order before panic turned everyone into caricature.
The session is open. All parties remain seated until further notice.
Alexander has half-risen in spite of him.
His lawyer, Master Étienne Roussel, grabbed his sleeve and forced him to sit back.
“Sit down,” he blew.
