On September 25, 1957, Maurice Blanchot’s mother passed away. She was nearly eighty-three years old. Had she returned to Quain in order to die there, or simply for the end of the summer? She died in the dwelling where she, as well as all her children, had been born. A few days previously, Blanchot had still been in Èze. He was with his mother when she died. These are difficult moments, as we are reminded by the scenes in Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, and even the few texts that subtly evoke a mother’s presence. In 1943, in the Journal des Débats, Blanchot had written about an autobiographical book by Jouhandeau, and he had not failed to emphasize a chance occurrence of the inverse image of his own mother: Jouhandeau’s family called their mother Marie, although she “was baptized Alexandrine.” Praising the author’s unashamed depiction of a son’s love, he saw it as a reflection of maternal love and the necessary legacy of a temperament necessary “to defy the abyss.”1 More recently, he had evoked the “force of the maternal figure” in “The Essential Solitude”: “if the Mother exerts this fascinating attraction it is because, appearing when the child lives totally under a fascinated gaze, she concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment.”2
For many years, Maurice Blanchot’s mother had lived with her sister Élise, in her daughter Marguerite’s house. Élise had died on September 28, 1953, in Chalon. Fate was stubbornly symbolic: Many of Blanchot’s relatives died on similar dates, shortly after his birthday on the twenty-second of that month. When his mother died, he had been fifty for three days.
Marguerite had taken her two elderly relatives into her care, her powerless mother, handicapped by coxalgia, and her aunt who had gone blind. While for day-to-day, domestic reasons she thought it necessary for her mother to be there and not elsewhere, this made for a heavy load; relatives sometimes said that the daughter remained unmarried out of to devotion to her elderly mother. The three women lived together in relative financial comfort: Marguerite’s piano lessons, renting out the ground floor of the house, the rent from the tenant farming at Devrouze, which had been invested profitably in small bonds, together brought in enough money to allow the purchase of an apartment in a former hotel at the tip of Cap Martin, close to the Èze property, which itself proved profitable through holiday rentals. Demanding, cautious, bressanes (from the Bresse region), as they say in Chalon, the three women managed their land themselves and authoritatively. Although they could have had a telephone, they did not get one installed: The few messages that did arrive were passed on by their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Herbinet.
Their mother’s death seems to have deeply affected the children. Maurice Blanchot spent the winter with his brother René at Rue Violet in Paris.
At this time he considered moving back to the capital for good. In 1958, no later than Summer, he moved to a one-bedroom apartment in the Rue Madame, on the corner of the Rue de Vaugirard. It would become his best-known address: it corresponded to the new period, around fifteen years, in which he was much more present on the public stage. He would meet people in the Café de la Mairie on the Place Saint-Sulpice; he would go to Marguerite Duras and Dionys Mascolo’s apartment in the Rue Saint-Benoît; he would even almost be George Bataille’s neighbor, for the last few months of the latter’s life. Some of his friends visited him: Dionys Mascolo remembered a large library, full of books, and Louis-René des Forêts recalls being shown into an austere room, furnished at random, with subdued lighting. For his part, it was the total absence of books, even on the table, that surprised him: “I felt slightly that I was entering the room of Monsieur Teste,” he recounted.3 Blanchot used to say that in Paris he was not in his own city, but in that of his brother René. Did he ever feel at home? Was he not always at his brother’s house, in one way or another? This was a family link that was never broken.