The Witch

Lucie, the novel's first-person narrator, is a woman of modest witchcraft abilities living in a French suburb with her husband Pierrot and their 12-year-old twin daughters, Maud and Lise. The women of Lucie's maternal line possess hereditary powers of divination, the ability to see the past and future, which causes the practitioner to weep tears of blood. Lucie initiates the twins in secret basement sessions, and after 11 months, both produce their first tears of blood on the same day. They receive the milestone with bored relief. Lucie admits her own talent is feeble, limited to trivial details, while her mother possesses extraordinary powers she fiercely represses. Lucie worries her unsentimental daughters will never pass the gift on.

Pierrot works at the Garden-Club, a sprawling countryside resort where he persuades wealthy couples to buy vacation packages. His success as the top salesman funds the family's comfortable lifestyle but leaves him moody and resentful each evening, feeling trapped in a domestic life he considers beneath him. He has developed a quiet contempt for Lucie. Their neighborhood is dominated by Isabelle, a stocky, intimidating woman who exercises tyrannical control through gossip and drags her small, anxious son Steve everywhere, openly despising him. When Lucie first moved in, she revealed her powers to Isabelle, who now demands regular predictions about Steve's future. Lucie sees Steve at around 20 with an expression of deep sadness but lies by describing him as smiling.

One evening, Pierrot brings home Monsieur Matin, a former Garden-Club client who has left his wife and son. Over dinner, Monsieur Matin describes feeling invisible in his own family. Pierrot listens with rapt admiration, treating the abandonment as heroism, and Lucie perceives he envies Monsieur Matin's courage. She intervenes by forcing Monsieur Matin to call his wife, who arrives and reveals this is a recurring pattern. While they wait, Monsieur Matin escapes over the backyard hedge. During the evening, Lise produces her first spontaneous tear of blood and casually predicts rain. Pierrot notices and looks away, his jaw tightening.

Two days later, Pierrot vanishes. Lucie's clairvoyant gaze shows his face against the skyline of Poitiers, his mother's city. At the bank, she discovers he transferred 120,000 francs, a gift from her father, from savings days before Monsieur Matin's visit and withdrew the full sum the day before he left. Maud and Lise receive the news with serene indifference. Pierrot's mother reports he has locked himself in his childhood room, refusing contact. She also describes the transformation of Pierrot's younger sister Lili, once a gloomy teenager, now enormously overweight, heavily made-up, and secretive.

During school break, Lucie resolves to reunite her separated parents by booking them a seaside hotel room for a weekend in June. She travels to Paris with the twins. At the station, a crow stares at Lucie with a look strikingly like Isabelle's. In Paris, they encounter Isabelle searching for a boarding school for the terrified Steve. At Lucie's mother's apartment, Robert, a school-district administrator and her mother's new companion, opens the door, complicating the reunion plan. A raven on the windowsill provokes Lucie's mother into violent fury. On the landing, Lucie presents her plan; her mother gives a noncommittal response.

Lucie visits her father, who has reinvented himself with dyed hair, a tan, and a sleek new apartment. He asks Lucie to return the 120,000 francs, revealing he has been embezzling from his insurance company. Maud and Lise demonstrate startling new abilities: They exit the apartment and reappear almost instantly, shedding small feathers, evidence they have transformed into birds. Lucie's father agrees to meet her mother at the hotel in exchange for the money.

Lucie travels to Poitiers to recover the funds from Pierrot, but he has fled. Pierrot's mother is nevertheless radiant because Lili is pregnant. She reveals that Pierrot became physically violent during his stay, nearly knocking her unconscious. Lucie's mother arrives and asks Lucie to cancel the reunion, explaining the true reason for the separation: After 25 years of hiding her powers, her husband glimpsed evidence of her witchcraft, and the knowledge awakened in her an uncontrollable need to destroy him. She left to protect him from herself. Despite this warning, Lucie insists, and her mother consents, though a menacing flame gleams in her eyes. That night, Lili and the twins go out. In the morning, Lili flatly announces the pregnancy is over; Maud and Lise repeat the statement in cold chorus. Pierrot's mother is devastated.

On a Poitiers street, Lucie reaches for her daughters' hands and touches the tip of a dark wing. The twins launch into the sky and vanish into a cloud. Lucie knows she has lost them forever, unable to distinguish them from any other birds.

Alone in the empty house, Lucie's powers fade daily. One evening she sees Pierrot driving into Bourges, a city in central France. She finds him living with a kindly, religious woman and her three children, jobless and soft. When Lucie asks for the money, he claims he needs it for the children. When she mentions Maud and Lise, he erupts in rage, calling them "filthy little witches" and ordering her out.

Outside Bourges, Isabelle picks Lucie up in a luxury car. She has reinvented herself as a polished businesswoman running Isabelle O.'s Women's University of Spiritual Health in Châteauroux, a fraudulent institution where she charges young women 8,000 francs a month for courses with mystical-sounding titles. She offers Lucie a teaching position, and Lucie, exhausted and destitute, accepts. Her fellow teachers are desperate women Isabelle recruited through want ads. Lucie's feeble powers cannot sustain the work, so she begins fabricating visions. The students' faith prevents them from questioning her, but Lucie starts doubting whether her powers ever truly existed.

Robert arrives with a small box containing a gray snail on a lettuce leaf. Lucie's mother went to the seaside on the appointed weekend, returned with the snail, and declared it to be Lucie's father, whom she transformed as punishment for remaking his life too eagerly. Lucie, knowing her mother's power is genuine, believes her. She calls her father's office and learns he is wanted for embezzlement.

Police officers and local officials arrive at the university after students complain that Lucie fabricated her visions. Isabelle feigns innocence and aligns with the authorities. Lucie is arrested for charlatanism and fraud. At the police station, a frightened young officer confiscates the box with the snail and locks Lucie in a cell. That evening, he returns in a state of rage, sets fire to her cot, and hisses that she is evil and should die. The fire fills the cell with thick smoke. The officer's wife returns unexpectedly, having forgotten a basket, and her arrival interrupts the attack. Before leaving, Lucie senses the snail has been discarded and that her father has likely perished.

Lucie emerges from custody into the Châteauroux sun. In the main square, she encounters Pierrot's mother on a tour-bus excursion with Pierrot and his new partner, who is visibly pregnant. Pierrot's mother reports that he wasted the 120,000 francs on a failed business school and cannot find work. She reveals that Lili has lost her reason, talking constantly about birds supposed to carry her away and grieving because it never happens. Pierrot approaches across the square, his old expression of irritable disgruntlement restored. As Lucie stands alone, not knowing where to go, Pierrot's mother, cheerful and oblivious, asks about her plans for summer vacation.