The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

the second stage (once she left high school), the same girl needed a
serious relationship
(referred to in German magazines as “big love”). Now the defining question was: “Should I move in with Jeremy?” This was the second and final stage. The flaw in the solution offered by girls’ magazines—arbitrarily recommending contradictory forms of behavior in consecutive periods of a girl’s life—only became apparent some years later with the inexorable rise in the divorce rate. Nevertheless, for many years girls, naïve and already disoriented by the speed of social change, accepted these improbable rules and tried their best to stick to them.
    . . .
    Things were very different for Annabelle. Last thing at night, before she went to sleep, she thought about Michel and every morning she was overjoyed to see him again. If something funny or interesting happened at school, her first thought was of the moment she could tell Michel about it. On days when they could not see each other for some reason, she was worried and upset. During the summer holidays (her family had a house in the Gironde), she wrote to him every day. The letters were more sisterly than passionate, and her feelings more a glow than a consuming fire, but even if she were reluctant to admit it to herself, the truth slowly dawned on her: on the first try, without looking, without really wanting to, she had found
true love
. Her first love was the real thing; there would not be another, and such a question did not even arise. It was a plausible scenario, according to
Mademoiselle Âge Tendre,
but one did well to be cautious as it almost never happened. There were, however, rare, almost miraculous cases that demonstrated it was possible. And if it happened to you it was the most wonderful thing in the whole world.

11
    Michel still had a photograph taken in the garden of Annabelle’s house during the Easter holidays of 1971. Her father had hidden Easter eggs in the bushes and flower beds. In the photo, Annabelle was standing in the middle of a bed of forsythias, parting the tall stems, intent on her search with all the gravity of childhood. She had just begun to mature; her face was delicate, and it was obvious even then that she would be exceptionally beautiful. The gentle swell of her sweater hinted at her breasts. This would be the last time there was an egg hunt at Easter; the following year they would be too old to play these games.
    At about the age of thirteen, progesterone and estrogen secreted by the ovaries in a girl’s body produce pads of fatty tissue around the breasts and buttocks. When perfectly formed, these organs have a round, full, pleasing aspect and produce violent arousal in the male. Like her mother at that age, Annabelle had a beautiful body. Her mother’s face was charming but plain, and nothing could have prepared her for the painful shock of Annabelle’s beauty; she was quite frightened by it. Annabelle owed her big blue eyes and the dazzling shock of blonde hair to her father’s side of the family, yet only the most extraordinary fluke of morphogenetics could account for the devastating purity of her face.
    Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible—no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate.
    At fifteen, Annabelle was one of those rare beauties who can turn every man’s head—regardless of age or physical fitness. She was one of the few who could send pulses racing in young and middle-aged alike and cause old men to groan with regret simply by walking down the street. She quickly noticed the