Rosy Auffray, alert against green algae

To show who her husband was, she took out some photo albums bearing witness to their travels. Like this long hike in Corsica, punctuated by "Jean-René's" naps in the middle of nature, she shows, amused . It was their last trip. "We enjoyed it until the end," Rosy Auffray says happily. She receives the journalist, who has the same surname as her but is not related, in the shade of the silk tree planted "to make a natural parasol" in front of their house, in Hillion.

Two months after Corsica, on September 8, 2016, Jean-René Auffray died. A trail runner, the barely fifty-year-old had gone to train with his dog. It was Rosy who found him, lying on the mud in the Gouessant estuary, the coastal river that flows not far from the house, at the bottom of the Bay of Saint-Brieuc, where green algae have been proliferating for decades. Fed by nitrates from agricultural fertilizers, their putrefaction releases a gas, hydrogen sulfide, which is fatal in high doses.

That day, there was no trace of ulva in the estuary. Rosy Auffray didn't make the connection and refused an autopsy. It was rumored that she had suffered a cardiac arrest due to exhaustion trying to get the dog out of the mud where she must have gotten stuck. Little by little, she discovered in the press that the authorities were aware of the dangers of the mudflats. Invisible, the algae could have sunk in and created pockets of gas. But, with the smokescreen maintained on the subject,