The narrator drives a cheap rental Škoda from her previous location toward Boulière and the Dubois family estate, having had several glasses of regional wine. She claims drinking makes her a more focused driver, though she is reckless with the clutch and indifferent to the rental car's wellbeing. She muses on the absurdity of cheap rentals and the oxymoron of "clean diesel."

Choosing scenic secondary roads to avoid sleep-inducing toll routes, she gets lost winding through the Massif Central. Frustrated by useless vistas of Roman ruins and castles, she pulls into an unpaved lot beside a closed, boarded-up, graffitied mountain inn, hoping for directions. She reflects contemptuously on graffiti as mere uglification.

The narrator surveys the post-rain lot, marked by truck ruts and chocolate-colored puddles, sensing it as a place of aftermath. She walks into the woods to urinate and finds Day-Glo-orange women's underpants snagged on a bush at eye level. She is unsurprised, launching into an extended meditation that the "real Europe" is not Parisian cafés but a borderless logistics network of trucks, warehouses, and migrant drivers from Eastern Europe who meet undocumented women in remote lots.

While still squatting and watching her urine stream downhill, she hears footsteps and startles, wondering if someone is there—ending the chapter on a note of suspense.