In Paris that day, a young French woman named Véronique (Irène Jacob), after sex with her former boyfriend, is overwhelmed with sadness, as if she were grieving. The next day, at the school where she teaches music, Véronique attends a marionette performance with her class about a ballet dancer who breaks her leg and then turns into a butterfly. She then leads her class in a musical piece by an eighteenth-century composer, Van den Budenmayer—the same piece performed by Weronika when she died. That night while driving home, she sees the puppeteer at a traffic light motioning to her not to light the wrong end of her cigarette. Later she is awakened by a phone call with no one speaking, but in the background she hears a choir singing the music of Van den Budenmayer. The next day, Véronique drives to her father's house where she reveals she is in love with someone she doesn't know, and that recently she felt she was alone—that someone was gone from her life. Back in Paris, she receives a letter containing a shoelace, which she compares to her EKG graph, and a stranger shines light on her using a mirror.