My writing, if it lasts, can only be an immense malaise. I renounce life,
I lie down to die.
My daughters are quiet.
After a few pages of painful fragments added one after the other without any apparent coherence, Lucile’s text ends with these words:
We are off to our house in the country. I am with my lover, we are with my father.
I am not affectionate yet I love my friend.
That night I can't sleep , I feel hunted. Forrest is sleeping upstairs.
I get up for a pee, my father is watching me, he gives me a sleeping pill and drags me into his bed.
He raped me while I was asleep, I was sixteen, I have said it.
W riting about your family is undoubtedly the easiest way to fall out with them. Lucile’s brothers and sisters won’t want to read what I have just transcribed nor what I am likely to say about it; I can sense this in the tension around my project now, and my feeling that I am bound to hurt them disturbs me more than anything else. They must be wondering what I am going to do with this, how I shall broach it, how far I am prepared to go. Since I am trying to get closer to Lucile, I cannot leave out the relations she had with her father, or rather that he had with her. It’s my duty to ask the question at least. But the question is not painless.
I’m firing at point-blank range and I know it.
One day I told my sister over lunch how terrified I was after reading Lionel Duroy’s fine book, Le Chagrin, which goes back over his childhood and describes the fundamental, irreparable way his siblings became estranged from him after the publication of a novel he wrote fifteen years earlier, in which he had portrayed them and his parents. Even today, none of them speak to him: he’s a traitor, a pariah.
Is fear enough to make one silent?
Looking rather distressed in front of her croque-monsieur, my sister promised me her unconditional support. ‘You have to see it through,’ she said; ‘don’t leave anything in the shadows.’
★
I left convinced that the only route I could take from where I had reached, from where we had all reached, was this one.
The man I love (and who I have come to believe loves me too) is getting worried at seeing me lose more sleep the further I go with this book. I try to explain that it’s normal (and nothing to do with the fact that I have got lost in an experiment in a new genre; nothing to do with the material I am dealing with; this has happened to me with other books that were pure fiction and so on). I tough it out, wave aside his concerns.
Is fear enough to make one silent?
At the age of thirty-two, Lucile wrote that her father had raped her. She sent the text to her parents and her siblings, she gave it to us to read. For several weeks, I imagined that something very serious was going to happen, something that would have repercussions, that the family would collapse, inevitably causing terrible damage. I was waiting for a drama.
Yet nothing happened. We continued to go to Pierremont for the weekend occasionally; no one chased my grandfather with a broom; no one punched him in the face on the stairs; my mother herself spoke to her father and didn’t spit at him. I was twelve years old and the logic of this escaped me. How could such a revelation not be followed by consequences? In school, grammar was the only subject that interested me. Yet in Pierremont, in the absence of a subordinating conjunction — ‘so that’, ‘as a consequence of which’, ‘following
which’ — nothing happened: no tears, no shouting. My mother visited her parents and they fretted about how tired she was, how thin and drawn she looked, the fact she wasn’t sleeping, how hard life was for their daughter, who was bringing up her children alone.
A few months later, Lucile retracted. Now she spoke of an ‘inappropriate’ relationship rather than an incestuous one; she denied her account of the act itself.
Like thousands of families, mine learned to live with doubt or simply sidestepped it. If necessary, they would acknowledge a certain ambivalence, an atmosphere that created confusion, but that was a far cry from imagining the worst . . . Lucile had simply imagined she’d been raped. That enabled everyone to breathe, though there was precious little air.
Proof that something was the matter with her was not long in coming.
Years later, when Manon and I were adults, at a time when Lucile was OK, my sister asked her about it again. Lucile said yes, it did happen. And that no one had reacted to the text that she sent.
The text remained a dead letter and all Lucile received in return was frozen silence.
A few months ago, when I asked my mother’s siblings to talk to me about her, they all agreed with genuine enthusiasm. Paying tribute to Lucile, trying to get close to her? Yes, of course.
For all of us, Lucile — her gentleness and her aggression — remains a mystery.
It scarcely need be said that the possibility that my grandfather raped Lucile was high on the list of things I wanted to discuss. Yet, when I began working on the book, I was far from certain.
When I listen again to the conversations I had with each of them, it seems to me that the question is always there from the outset. It hangs in the air even before it is asked. In spite of the silence, years later, Lucile’s text has left its mark. They know I shall come round to it; they either delay the moment or else pre-empt it; some acknowledge Georges’s ‘adoration of his daughter; they mention ‘'fascination or 'passion . His love, the way he looked at her, could indeed have been oppressive for her, could have put ideas in her head. But aren’t all girls in love with their fathers? They tread carefully, weigh each word. Incest? No, definitely not. Not in reality.
Only Justine (who broached the subject right at the outset) acknowledged the possibility that it may actually have happened.
Justine was the last of Lucile’s siblings I interviewed. As she lives in the country and doesn’t often come to Paris, we had trouble finding a date for me to visit her and in the end she came to me. I was more apprehensive about this interview than the others because Justine and Lucile’s relationship was often adversarial, extremely tense, as though a pain that was impossible to share had crystallised between them. After listening to Lisbeth, Barthelemy and Violette, who were instinctively unable to imagine that Lucile could have been telling the truth, I was particularly interested in Justine’s account, as she never minced her words (and she had distanced
herself from Georges for a few years).
Justine told me about the month she had spent alone with Georges one summer when she was eighteen or nineteen, at the time when her father took his children to Pierremont singly or in groups to help with the building work. Justine told me how Georges endlessly pestered her to take her T-shirt and bra off, to strip off, to relax. He wanted to take pictures of her, to help her to discover her sexuality, to teach her how to masturbate. Justine escaped at the first opportunity to walk by the canal and Georges locked her out. She was afraid the whole time. He took a series of pictures of her that Justine never found. Georges was not a man who took no for an answer.
I asked for details: how far did he go? He [fiddled' with her, but didn’t rape her. Maybe he was scared she would talk, because Justine, unlike Lucile, was vociferous. Justine experienced Georges’s oppression, his looks, the threat he represented.
Today, she claims her own share of hatred for this man who ruined her youth and long damaged her capacity for happiness. This man who could have been content with being a wonderful father.
Another day, also as research for this book, I met Camille. She is Gabriel’s younger sister and was one of my mother’s best friends when they were in their early twenties. I wanted her to tell me about Lucile and her first loves, to find out what sort of young woman Lucile was, to discover how she laughed and danced, what she thought about the future. I was hoping that Camille would help me gain access to the luminous, sparkling Lucile of the television programme. I wanted the carefree, flighty Lucile.
1 hadn’t imagined for an instant what Camille would tell me, yet it came out very quickly, without being spelled out, when I asked her about Lucile, Georges and the Poirier family: it was an incomplete sentence that hung in the air, but the signal was clear. Camille hesitated: this was off the subject; we had already suffered so much; she wasn’t sure she needed to bring that up. I pressed her.
Camille didn’t talk about Lucile’s relations with her father, but about her own. She was sixteen and had met Georges only a few times before. The Poiriers had invited her to Spain. It had been arranged that he would take her to Alicante, where Liane, the children and Gabriel were already on holiday. Her father had died the year before, her mother was old; they had agreed that it would do Camille good to have a change of air, get away with the young people, have some fun. A few days later, Camille found herself in the car with Georges, whom she hardly knew. On the way, they stopped first to pick up one of Lucile’s cousins, then to have a rest at the home of some friends of Georges’s. The three of them — the cousin, Camille and Georges — found themselves in the same bed, with Georges taking the middle place for himself. During the night, Georges pressed himself against her and started to caress her. A terrified Camille said nothing. In Spain, she kept out of his way, and then she was struck down with appendicitis and immediately rushed home to France.
For months, Georges demanded that Camille call him and meet him in various places. He was crazy about her. He made appointments with her which she got out of, gave her code names so that she could phone him at the agency, addresses where he would be waiting. The more she fled from him, the more threatening he
became. If she didn’t accede to his demands, he would tell her mother how she had pressed herself against him that night, how she had tried to enflame his desire, to seduce him. Camille knew nothing about sex and the thought of her family hearing such dreadful things terrified her. All the more so since her mother kept insisting that she thank Liane and Georges for having so generously invited her and that she accept Georges’s repeated invitations to their home. Time went by, but Georges didn’t give up. He never missed an opportunity to remind her what she owed him.
Eventually, he got his way. First, one evening after a dinner he had got her to agree to, then a whole weekend at Pierremont, where he set a trap to get her alone with him. Terrified by his threats, Camille gave in. She had shameful, painful memories, which she didn’t talk about for years, of these two days which she spent shut up under Georges’s control (on the pretext that the neighbours shouldn’t see her), during which she had to submit to his erotic games and punishments. The next school year, she went to a college in England to escape Georges’s clutches. She felt guilty for years.
When she returned to France, Camille married and had children, in spite of the imprint that Georges had left on her body and the feeling of guilt that has never left her.
After Lucile and Gabriel’s divorce, Lucile and Camille lost touch. Camille also got divorced and remarried a few years later.
She was at Lucile’s funeral.
I told Camille about Lucile’s text and her retraction: the way we rallied around the idea that it was a figment of her imagination; put it down
to her illness; my lingering, unanswered doubt. Camille was stunned. She told me she often had the feeling that Lucile was protecting herself from her father, that she was avoiding being alone with him.
They never spoke about it. One weekend when Camille was at Pierremont with Lucile and Gabriel, Georges came into Camille’s bedroom, naked, in the middle of the night. But when he heard Gabriel, who must have seen him in the corridor, it scared him off. Later, on the journey home, when the two of them were alone in the car, Lucile asked Camille about her father: what was he doing there in the middle of the night? What had he wanted? Lucile was on edge, aggressive. Camille said nothing.
If she had said something, if they had talked about it, would their lives have been different?
After her visit, Camille wrote to say how relieved our conversation had made her feel. After all these years, she felt less guilty.
During my research, Manon reminded me about something she had mentioned in the past but which I had blocked out. One day when she was on holiday at La Grande-Motte, Georges, for a reason she doesn’t recall, decided to buy her a bathing costume. At the time going topless was de rigueur , but Manon chose a sporty white one-piece with lining. As she was thanking him for the gift, Georges came close to her and stroked her shoulder, saying: ‘If you’re really good, you can have other gifts.’
Manon was sixteen; the implication of what Georges said was not lost on her. She confided in Lisbeth’s children and one of them couldn’t stop himself passing the confidence on to Liane. Liane, in
an icy tone that Manon hadn’t heard before, reprimanded her: ‘It’s not nice to say things like that about your grandfather.’
Lucile kept all her correspondence. When she died, we found most of her father’s letters in her cardboard boxes. Manon stored them at her house along with the rest of her papers and writings. When I began working on this book, I asked her for them. Manon had read them and told me there was nothing in them, nothing specific. Georges wrote to Lucile from time to time with news, that was all. When I began sorting them by date, I was struck by a strange fact: during the summer of’78 (a few months before Lucile wrote her text), Georges had sent her eight letters in less than three weeks. Liane was making her ‘July Tour’ at the time (visiting family and friends) and Georges was in the south of France by himself, where my grandmother would join him in August. Eight letters in three weeks, sometimes two on the same day. I shuddered at the thought of finding some clue or detail that my sister had missed and read them very carefully. But the letters gave nothing away. Judging by what Georges wrote, Lucile was having problems at work and was worrying about her health. Georges advised her to go and see a haematologist and get some rest; he insisted that she should come and join him, hoped at one point that she would get away for the weekend of 14 July, reminded her that if necessary he would buy her ticket; then, after 14 July had come and gone, insisted that she come down in August.
Two months after Milo’s death — which he never mentions — Georges was worrying about Lucile. He probably feared for her, that’s all.
★
i93
When I mentioned to Violette that I would like to take Georges’s recordings home with me that day we were in her cellar looking for the cassettes, she got into a terrible rage. She became shrill and agitated, trembling with anger; she refused, she didn’t want to, it was out of the question that she would give me them if they were going to be used against her father. Helplessly, I told her that all I was after were some of Georges’s memories about his career and anecdotes about the rue de Maubeuge, which I wanted to describe but hadn’t yet captured the atmosphere. This was true, in that I did not for a second think that I would find the slightest trace on the cassettes of the ambiguity in Georges’s relationship with Lucile.
At the time when Georges was recording his memories, he told Violette that he had devoted one cassette to his sex life. She made clear to him that she didn’t want to hear about it. A fortnight later, he claimed he had destroyed it. She told me this herself.
Violette let me take the cassettes.
Lucile and Georges are both dead; it’s too late to find out the truth. Lucile was bipolar and it seems that incest is one of the factors which may trigger the condition. I haven’t found data on this. The text Lucile left among her papers says that Georges gave her a sleeping pill, then raped her.
Among the writings we found in her flat (which she didn’t judge necessary to throw away, and therefore left for us to see), I discovered a draft of her text written in pencil in a school exercise book. It shows how she redrafted this point:
‘Final tableau = We are off to our house in the country with my lover, we are with my father. I am not affectionate I am t oo af t nd m ca s e my fa t her sees us. My Friend Forrest is sleeping upstairs. I get up for a pee, my father is watching me, he gives me a sleeping pill and drags me into his bed t o relax me, I am so nervous. I don' t know if he-Tciped-me, He raped me while I was asleep, sixteen years ago, and I am saying it.’
When Manon returned to this subject years later, Lucile told her that Georges made her sit on the edge of his bed, then started to caress her. She fainted in terror. There was no mention of sleeping pills. That is more or less the version she wrote in 1984, when the psychoanalyst whose patient she had been for months, and who kept coming up against her silence, asked her to keep a diary:
‘Saturday 29.12.1984. Today my father gave me a round watch to cover up the tattoo on my wrist, which he doesn’t like. I like the tattoo, it’s part of me. My father doesn’t know that he is the origin of this tattoo. Ten past ten is the time I woke up in their bedroom after having spent a night with him when he may have raped me. I don’t know. All I know is that I was very afraid and fainted. It’s the most afraid I have ever been in my life.’
Until the end of her life, Lucile kept that round watch tattooed on her wrist. Ten past ten, the time she woke up, the time that watches in jewellers’ windows are set at.
What if nothing happened that night? And fear was all there was, that huge fear, and the unconsciousness that followed?
★
i95
Sometimes I am haunted by a different idea:
What if Lucile, unable to talk about it or write it down, came up against an even greater taboo, that of her own state of consciousness? What if Lucile didn’t faint, though frozen in fear, and Georges abused his power, his control, to make her submit to his desire, to convince her to give in? What if Lucile, like Camille, was unable to say no; didn’t know how to?
Then shame would have distilled its poison and made any words impossible without distortion. Then shame would have carved out its own channel of despair and disgust.
I reread these words from L’Inceste , in which Christine Angot reveals how her father abused his power over her: ‘I’m sorry to talk to you about all this, I’d much prefer to be able to tell you about something else. But this is what made me mad. I am sure of it; it is because of this that I went mad.’
We shall never know. We all either have our own convictions or have suspended judgement.
Maybe that is the hardest part: not being able to hate Georges, but never able to absolve him either. Lucile bequeathed this doubt to us, and doubt is a poison.
A few months after she wrote this text and the silence which surrounded its distribution, Lucile was committed for the first time. Juxtaposition is to writing what collage is to images. The way I write these sentences, the way I place them, reveals my truth. It is mine alone.
L ucile could no longer bear the cooped-up atmosphere of our house in Bagneux, the carpet grimy with age, the double- glazing cracked from top to bottom, her long journey to work on public transport. At 1 p.m. one day in late July, she visited an apartment in the ninth arrondissement , very near the district where she had lived as a child. It was much bigger than others on offer for the price and seemed clean and light. The kitchen and bathroom were huge and well-appointed. The estate agent pressed her and she signed there and then. Lucile arranged the move, repainted our rooms, then joined us in the South, where we were on holiday with Liane and Georges. Everything passed off as though the text had never existed, as though none of this (the dark hours, the accusations) had ever happened. All three of us went home at the end of August. It was not long before Lucile realised what a mistake she had made.
Our new apartment at number 13, rue du Faubourg-Montmartre was directly opposite the Palace nightclub and the offices of the sports newspaper UEquipe. Beneath our windows two lanes of buses and countless tourist coaches threaded their way down this narrow artery to Pigalle or the Folies-Bergere at all hours of the day and night. It was one of the noisiest streets in Paris; there were people everywhere all the time. To get to the stairs in the hall of our building, we had to walk round the queue for Studio 43, a local cinema the nature of whose programme (B-movies, Z- or X-rated films, two for the price of one) has remained obscure to me to this day. From the kitchen window, we watched monstrous rats feeding calmly from the bins of the local fast-food joint, neon signs flashed on and off all night, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to be woken up by the sound of shouting and sirens when the Palace closed. Hiding behind the curtains, I’d get up to watch the quarrels, the police raids, the fights being broken up.
Lucile was still working as a secretary for the same promotion company. She frequently mocked her boss, dreamed of long holidays in faraway places, and sometimes told us anecdotes about the office.
Manon’s bedroom opened on to the living room, where Lucile had put her bed. Lucile’s mattress rested on wooden palettes, which served as a bed-base. Almost every night, Manon heard Lucile crying.
I had started in the fourth year at a school on rue Milton, which I went to by bus. My childish closeness to Tadrina was long gone and I was finding adolescence a real torture: I wore braces on my teeth, which my cousins called ‘the nuclear power station’, I had curly hair that was impossible to tame, tiny breasts and puny thighs. 1 blushed whenever anyone spoke to me and didn’t sleep the night before I had to recite a poem or give a presentation in front of the class. In order to appear more at ease in this Parisian environment, which I found so intimidating, I created a character for myself: a sad, lonely girl, eaten away by a secret drama, and turned down any
invitation likely to distract me from my misery Manon, who was at a local primary school where most of her friends were Jewish, pretended to be Jewish too, and invented religious festivals and fervent prayers for herself. To explain the shape of her face (broad and smooth, like Faye Dunaway), Manon told anyone who would listen about the day she had hit a tree when galloping at high speed on a runaway horse.
Manon was a happy, confident, smiling child. I was a serious, solemn, cerebral adolescent. We spent most of our time stealing from shops; the local area offered rich pickings. Pains d’Epices, a model and toy shop on passage Jouffroy, where we plied our trade several times a week and left with our pockets full, and Monoprix, in an era before anti-theft systems, became our places of choice. In order to explain this sudden affluence to Lucile, I piled lie upon lie: I had swapped some of my junk, miraculously found money in the street, had friends who had grown out of their clothes and given them to me, kmd-hearted mothers who gave me gifts — the rest we hid in our drawers.
One day Manon got caught and received a lecture from a sales assistant; we only just avoided disaster.
Lucile couldn’t bear the incessant noise from the street, the mice that invaded the kitchen the moment our backs were turned or the rats the size of rabbits, rummaging through the bins all night.
Lucile was isolating herself in an ever darker world in which curls of smoke were sometimes followed by powder.
★
Virginia was in my class and lived directly opposite us on the sixth floor of the L’Equipe building. She couldn’t have cared less about my problems, or her own, or any problems in fact. Virginia lived in a tiny apartment with her mother, who was a cleaner. She prided herself on dragging me along to parties and on cinema trips, and gave a loud whistle from the window every morning to signal it was time to go. It didn’t take long for her energy to breach my self- created barriers. Thanks to her, I joined the most prestigious group in the school. I discovered The Specials, Madness, Police and The Selecter. I skipped classes I thought were boring in favour of heated discussions in cafes or trips to Galeries Lafayette. I was unambiguously entering a new world, a world which pulsed and throbbed and was alive.
On 4 January 1980, my grandmother’s sister Barbara and her husband Claude Yelnick, then communications director on France - Soir, were invited on to the TV programme Apostrophes to talk about the book they had written together entitled Deux et lafolie. The book described from both their viewpoints Barbara’s illness, which was characterised by alternating periods of hyperactivity, indeed delirium, and deep depression.
Probably the broadcast coincided with the end of the Christmas holidays, because I remember the whole family gathered in reverent silence in the ‘television room’ in Pierremont, which was dedicated to the cult of the small screen (which was in fact huge and took pride of place in a cabinet designed specially for it). Some people were sitting in large armchairs covered in soft sheepskin; the rest of us sat on the blue carpet. We waited with
bated breath. The programme had hardly begun when the first whispered comments began: Why’s she dressed like that? Who’s he going to start with? No, really, his suit’s perfect. The first exasperated shushes flew across the room. And then: Come on, pay attention; Barbara and Claude are going first; isn’t that chic/ great/amazing? Can you be quiet? And who is it who keeps coughing like that?
When we got back to Paris, Lucile began painting on the wall of the living room a tormented fresco, consisting of arabesques and spirals, dark green on a white background. That’s how I remember it: tortured and threatening.
One evening, Justine’s boyfriend Pablo rang the bell; he was holding a basket of oysters he had just stolen from outside a brasserie on the boulevard Montmartre. He’d been in the area. A few minutes later he went back to ask for a lemon and sympathised with the waiter, who was lamenting how he had been tricked the moment his back was turned. Pablo opened the oysters and we tucked in to the feast.
In the next few days, I thought Lucile seemed increasingly agitated.
Another evening for dinner she served us frozen raspberries straight from the packet, which we found impossible to eat.
For a few days, Lucile had only been buying sweet foods (I added in my diary: ‘which are dead expensive ').
★
On 29 January Lucile invited Manon and me to a special meeting whose agenda soon became apparent. Lucile wanted to announce that she was telepathic. Consequently she knew what was going on even far away and could control most things. Just as she said this, we heard mice squeaking in the kitchen. Lucile added that she could also make mice disappear, but then said immediately: ‘Ah no, what an idiot I am. They’re not things’ (a sentence which I reproduced verbatim in my diary). Wherever we went, she could see us in mirrors and could protect us from afar. And we had powers too. Manon was a witch who could hear everything and could decipher, thanks to her power of hearing, the hostile world around her. Lucile added that she’d have to take her to an ear, nose and throat specialist so as to make the most of this power. As for me, I was the Delphic oracle: I could predict the future and my predictions would come true. But I had to be careful not to predict bad things. Lucile held a pair of scissors close to my neck and I felt the point brush my skin. I held my breath and watched her trembling hand. She sat down again and explained that she had written a letter to a famous psychoanalyst, which, because she had no stamps, she was going to send him that very evening telepathically.
The next day was a Wednesday, our day for the dental school. Manon received treatment from the dental students in the morning and I had an orthodontics session in the afternoon. As we were about to set off, Lucile announced that it was out of the question that we should take the metro: the Parisian transport network was not entirely under her control. She gave me money
so we could take a taxi, because she did control of all of the taxis in Paris. No vehicle escaped her vigilance. Lucile asked me with the greatest seriousness if I would prefer our driver to be a man or a woman. After several seconds of reflection, I said I’d prefer a woman. Manon and I no longer dared look at each other. We went down the stairs in appalled silence.
My mother was an adult. My mother had read a lot and knew lots of things. My mother was clever. How could I imagine that my mother was talking nonsense? I was thirteen years old. I went hesitantly towards the line of taxis, torn between respect for what she had said and the stirring of my own awareness, between the desire for the driver to be a man and the desire for her to be a woman. Something was happening which couldn’t be expressed, which was beyond my ken. The idea of secretly taking the metro and giving her the money back later briefly occurred to me (taking taxis wasn’t part of our lifestyle and struck me as a shocking waste of money). But I was scared that she would discover my betrayal through her powers. Manon was silent. With a knot in our stomachs, we went towards the front of the taxi rank.
At the head of the queue, there was a man behind the wheel. We got in the car and 1 told him our destination — rue Garanciere — with the note that Lucile had given me burning a hole in my hand. I felt bad.
That same evening, Lucile came home with a black eye. She told us that Jacques Lacan, the great psychoanalyst, had hit her.
Lisbeth came from Brunoy for dinner. Lucile’s brothers and sisters were starting to get worried about her; she was saying odd things on the phone. Lisbeth had been sent to find out what was going on. Lucile, with her black eye and in a state of great agitation, took us to Chartier’s. As was usual there, we shared our table with other diners. During the meal, Lucile talked a lot, laughed, sobbed, stole chips from the plate of the man beside her, waved her arms and summoned the waiter for the slightest thing. She was convinced that he was making us wait deliberately; he had a grudge against us: she’d already noticed he had something against her personally.
I watched Lisbeth. I was waiting for her to say something: don’t worry about it, what’s happening is entirely normal, there’s no reason to panic or even be afraid; your mum will go back to normal, a good night’s sleep and there’ll be no trace of it; but Lisbeth looked just as much at a loss as we did. After dinner, we went back to the apartment and Lisbeth went home. As I was about to put the light out, Lucile said that tomorrow she would buy me the pink velvet trousers with fine ribbed stripes that I had previously asked her for without success.
For several days Lucile had been spending money she didn’t have; it wouldn’t be long before we found this out. Lucile was spending without counting the cost.
Later that night Manon heard her crying in bed again.
T he next morning Lucile decided she wasn’t going to work (she hadn’t gone the day before either). She also reckoned that we deserved a lie-m. We had gone to bed late, and so she excused us from having to go to school for an unspecified period, but from the way she said it, we imagined that it could last for some time. Moreover, for some days Lucile had sensed from a distance that Mr Rigon, the headteacher at my school, was very irritated. It would be best to avoid all contact with him. I had no desire to stay with her; I was beginning to think she wasn’t right in the head. I insisted on going to school and tried to persuade Manon to do the same. Manon refused. She wanted to stay with Lucile, whose distress was apparent to her.
In the bus on the way to school, I tried to analyse the situation. Should I be worried? Even having gone back over the events of the past few days, I found it impossible to acknowledge that Lucile was really going off the rails, still less that she could become a danger to herself and to us. Lucile was going through a bad patch, that was all. When I got to school, I met Virginia and Jean-Michel, another friend from my class, who were planning to bunk off PE to go to Galeries Lafayette. I debated for a moment with them; I had just got off the bus and was reluctant to turn around again, but in the end I agreed. For some reason I can’t recall, we went back to Virginia’s. Almost as soon as we got there, I went over to the window. From the sixth floor, I was able to look down and see what was going on
in our apartment. I saw Lucile standing in the living room: she was naked and her body was painted white. This sight took my breath away. Paralysed, I couldn’t take my eyes off her, though I could hardly believe it entirely. I looked for Manon, but she wasn’t to be seen. It was nearly two hours since I had left the apartment: something was wrong, seriously wrong. I didn’t want to go to Galeries Lafayette any more; I wanted to stay there and for all this to stop and return to normal. I watched Lucile for a moment longer. 1 was finding it harder and harder to breathe. She was still standing there and from her gestures of impatience, I understood that she wanted Manon to come over to her. Lucile stamped her foot. Manon didn’t appear; she was clearly refusing to obey. Suddenly Lucile seized the plank of wood that we used as a backrest on the old barber’s chair and raised it above her head with both hands. The plank remained suspended in the air, ready to be brought down on Manon. I raced down the stairs, rushed across the street without looking, and in a few seconds was in the hall of our building. I climbed the stairs two at a time and arrived breathless at our door. Violette had just arrived. She had rung the bell two or three times and got no reply. I screamed: ‘She’s hitting her, she’s hitting her!’ I pressed the bell as hard as I could, shouted again. Violette took me in her arms and my body pitched backwards. Violette supported me for a few seconds; I felt unable to breathe. In my panic, I finally realised that I had a key. I opened the door and we rushed into the living room. Lucile was holding Manon by the hair to stop her getting away. Violette ordered her to let her go. Manon flew into my arms. Now that I held her against
me, she began to cry. Lucile had wanted to put acupuncture needles in her eyes and had managed to insert one below her right eye. Suddenly, uniformed men appeared behind us. Someone had called the police. Everything got unbearably jumbled up in all the confusion. Lucile was naked and painted white, looking crazed, her body shaking. Manon was terrified. Virginia and Jean-Michel had arrived. Someone suggested taking my sister to the doctor along the street at number 7. I let go her hand and Jean-Michel hugged her.
We had to leave the apartment. We had to leave Lucile, naked and white, to face half a dozen cops.
At the doctor’s, a police sergeant came to get us.
The doctor removed the paint flecks that Manon had in both eyes and cleaned the small trace that the needle had left under her right eye. Then we left his office and, while Lucile was being taken care of by the police in our apartment, we were kept apart from her in the police van parked across the street. A crowd gathered at once. On the other side of the windows, people were pushing and shoving, craning on tiptoe. Their eyes were trained on us, eager to see bruises and bleeding wounds. I wanted to spit in their faces.
When Lucile was dressed — Violette had made her have a bath to calm her down and try to get the paint off — we swapped places with her in the van. So that we didn’t have to see her, they took us away before she was brought down.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning; life in the street went on as though nothing had happened; nothing had stopped, not the
deliveries or the noise of car horns, not the smell of frying from the shops or the flashing neon signs. Nothing apart from our lives.
Violette picked us up that winter Thursday like two damaged packages. She was twenty-five.
That afternoon we went back to the apartment to collect some things for the night. That evening Violette made up beds for us in her little studio apartment. We eventually got to sleep, curled up in quilts she’d brought back from her travels in South America.
Next morning I woke up dazed and stiff. I insisted on going to school. I knew that I wouldn’t be going back. Every hour felt like it was the last: last French lesson, last history class, last notes exchanged across the classroom, last secrets whispered in the playground, where a few weeks earlier I had bashed my head against a wall to get out of a German test. (The tactic had worked so well that I was taken to hospital. Thereafter I couldn’t sleep, feeling guilty for costing Lucile a pointless X-ray.)
None of that mattered any more. My mother had gone mad; she had suffered a delirious episode; my mother had something the matter with her. The word ‘episode’ made me think of TV comedies, but I couldn’t see the funny side. I didn’t understand what they were trying to explain to us: Lucile was very tired, she needed rest, she hadn’t meant to hurt Manon, she wasn’t in her right mind, she loved us with all her heart but her nerves had cracked, things would work out, things always work out in the end.
★
That evening as arranged we caught the train to Normandy, where our father was still living with his wife and our little brother. With my forehead pressed to the window, I watched the countryside that we almost knew by heart go by I shut my eyes, trying to find a time out of time where none of this had happened.
When we arrived, we had to describe things we didn’t understand ourselves, things which obeyed no logic, made no sense, which could only be expressed a little bit at a time, and yet they had happened.
The following Monday I was unceremoniously sent to L’Aigle school in Orne, and Manon went to the primary school in the same town. Exiled and dazed. The shape of my so-called cowboy jeans (wide at the top and narrow at the bottom) hadn’t yet reached those parts, so there was astonishment at such a garment and sniggers behind my back.
A few days later, our stepmother bought us new clothes. A few weeks went by before we were able to return to Lucile’s apartment to collect our things and several months before we could see her again.
This was where we were to live for several years. We didn’t yet realise how our lives had been turned upside down.
In Gabriel’s nice house, at the end of a little dirt track, we were going to discover a different sort of brutality, which we would be unable to put into words for years.
o me 31 January 1980 represents a sort of initial point of
_A_ severance, one of those which seem to remain intact in the memory, anchored in the body, one of those which you know will never be completely erased any more than the pain which is attached to them.
Later, the body will assimilate the fear; it will enter the bloodstream, be diluted and become a constituent part of how it functions.
For Lucile, I am sure of one thing: there would be a before and an after.
I have written about Lucile’s first committal in a few pages. I know how inadequate they are, how partial and reductive all this is. Even today, I am looking at the scene from afar, unable to decipher it, I am — literally and metaphorically — in the building across the street.
For questionable authenticity, I could have copied out word for word the police report my father sent me, which was written on the same day by the police officer Jean-Michel R., the subject of which is given as follows: ‘Transfer to the Lariboisiere Hospital of a person suffering a nervous breakdown, who committed abuse of a minor under the age of thirteen (her daughter). CID boss in attendance.’
I’m not sure that would have enabled me to get closer.
★
During the series of interviews I conducted for this book, I asked Manon and Violette to describe that day. I wanted to compare my recollection with theirs, to reconstruct how things happened. On some points of detail, our memories differ (was my cousin Frank there the day Lucile claimed she could control the taxis? Did we both sleep at Violette’s the night she was taken away?), but the essentials are brutally the same.
That January morning, Lisbeth had called Lucile after I left. She found her more and more confused and became worried about Manon being alone with her. Lisbeth rang Violette, who didn’t live far from us, and asked her to go round.
During her crisis, Lucile stood naked and white at the window and demanded that Manon describe the passers-by. Gradually, a small crowd, attracted by the shouting, gathered on the pavement opposite. Someone must have called the police.
I would like to be able to write what happened to Lucile minute by minute, to capture the exact moment when things got out of control, examine the phenomenon under the microscope, grasp its mystery, its chemistry.
Before I began writing this book, in that singular, precious time when the text is being thought about, being fantasised, before a single word or any music has come from the keyboard, I envisaged writing about Lucile going off-course in the third person, as I did about some scenes from her childhood, through a new, reinvented ‘she’, which might have opened up the unknown for me. For example, I would like to have written about her visit to Jacques
Lacan (‘she burst into the waiting room despite his receptionist forbidding it, and asked to sit down’), to describe her wandering around the city, fill in the blanks, reconstruct the impossible: the time of pure madness which even Lucile herself did not fully know about.
But I didn’t know how.
A few years after it happened, my mother wrote about her first breakdown, and the immense void that followed. We found these pages at Lucile’s home jumbled up with others: rambling, morbid thoughts, thoughts about love, more or less legible fragments scribbled in pencil, poems in verse and prose, undated loose-leaf sheets. It was all stored in a tin filing cabinet that I had given her ages before.
This text has no title, but it has been typed up and, like the others, copied several times. I began by recopying it into my own text in its entirety: twenty closely typed pages, a raw account, steeped in guilt. I thought that nothing could translate Lucile’s suffering better than her own words. But once the text was there, stuck in the middle of my pages, it seemed as though it didn’t belong, couldn’t be integrated with my own material, at least not like this, as a single block. Then I decided to keep just a series of extracts, separated by ellipses, a selection worthy of Reader's Digest , but this didn’t blend in any better. In fact it resisted: it revealed its own bitter and uneven timeframe and its fluctuating register.
Later it became clear to me that I had to take responsibility for my words, my silences, my hesitations, my breaths, my
convolutions — in short, my own language. And try to make the fairest use of Lucile’s words, to keep the most intense, distinctive themes.
The text begins with these words:
"This year, in November, I will be thirty-three. A rather uncertain age, I think, if one were superstitious. I am a beautiful woman except that I have rotten teeth, which in a certain way I’m very pleased about, sometimes it even makes me laugh. I wanted it to be known that death lies beneath the surface.’
Lucile then describes the days leading up to her crisis. She cries alone in the street, in a Chinese shop, then in Galeries Lafayette; she buys a piano on rue Vivienne, then all sorts of objects and clothes that don’t suit her. Later, she finds herself at Lacan’s office - to whom she sent a letter a few days earlier - demanding to see him. When his secretary tells her that he won’t see her, Lucile asks to rest in his waiting room. When the psychoanalyst comes out of his office and asks what she’s doing there, she flings herself on him and grabs his glasses, shouting: ‘I’ve got him! I’ve got him!’ Lacan slaps her face, the secretary manages to pm her to the floor before both of them throw her out, without any form of help. This scene, as Lucile describes it, explains the black eye that she came home with the day before her committal. Years later, at a time when I became interested in Lacan’s seminars, I asked Lucile if this story was true. Did it really happen as she described? She assured me it did. At the end of his life, Lacan saw patients
every ten minutes for astronomical sums and, by then suffering from cancer which he refused to have treated, didn’t greatly trouble himself about them. No more than he did about a woman suffering a full-blown crisis who burst into his office. That’s what Lucile told me. I never tried to verify this version. I believed it.
Lucile had a precise recollection of 31 January: my refusal to stay at home, my setting off for school, the almond croissants that Manon bought for breakfast, the titles of the chapters of The Master and Margarita that she read aloud to her, the threat the cover of the paperback suddenly represented, the fresco that she had been painting on the living-room wall for several weeks, which she suddenly judged malevolent (it seemed to her as though the interlinked lines formed a swastika) and which she had to get rid of at once. She asked Manon to help her cover it over with white paint, but became impatient with how slow she was. She shook her and hit her to make her go faster. And then the worst happened: the mad idea, which struck her as a certainty, that she had to treat Manon with acupuncture needles in her eyes (having stuck several needles in her own head as my sister looked on in terror).
In the police van, Lucile took off her clothes again. Under the brown blanket they put round her, she had hallucinations which she remembered: her brother Jean-Marc getting out of his coffin in the blue overalls he liked wearing. In the Lariboisiere Hospital, they assessed her as too aggressive to admit. She was then transferred to the psychiatric services of the thirteenth arrondissement
and ended up in the Maison Blanche Hospital, which she left two weeks later, still in a highly delirious state.
I wrote earlier of how much Gerard Garouste’s book affected me. I wish Lucile had lived long enough to read it. First, because she loved painting, and second, because I’m sure that if she had read his book she would have felt less alone. Lucile drew a lot and sometimes painted, and left behind a certain number of texts and an impressive collection of reproductions of self-portraits from all periods and countries, including one by Garouste. She was born the same year as him and lived opposite the Palace nightclub where he painted the sets and also spent some of his nights. In L’Intranquille, Garouste describes his first delirious episode in detail. He too remembers it all: the way in which he fled the house where he was on holiday with his wife, the journey he made hitch-hiking and by tram, giving his wedding ring to a stranger, throwing his identity card out of a taxi window, stealing money from his parents, the 500F notes he gave to children in the street, slapping a woman for no reason, the priest in Bourg-la- Reine whom he wanted to see at all costs, his outbursts of violence.
‘Some delirious episodes are unforgettable,’ he confesses, ‘others are not.’
Lucile didn’t forget anything about that day in January 1980 either. She wrote:
‘That day my life crumbled irreversibly. I mistook hawks for handsaws, fish for fowl. I could no longer distinguish the real from
the imaginary. I was about to spend 48 hours of hell before I got to the psychiatric hospital, ceaselessly wandering about, talking, acting, going too far.
‘It was time with reverberations that would go very far and cost me very dear. It was irreversible time.’
The memory records everything, and sorting happens afterwards when the crisis has passed.
I have never before put 31 January into words, not in the diary that I kept then (I lacked the time, or the courage), nor in the letters I wrote to my friends in the days that followed, nor later in my first novel. The end of January still represents a sort of danger period for me (I discovered Lucile’s body on 30 January). It’s something which is rooted in the body’s memory.
I found the account that my sister gave of what she experienced that morning when she was alone with Lucile overwhelming. I had forgotten it in part, probably because of the unbearable details it contained. Manon was nine and a half. She didn’t receive any psychological help; she remained with the loneliness of what could not be spoken. It belongs to her; that too is probably part of her character.
One day a few months ago when I was taking a taxi to Roissy airport, the driver began asking me where I was going, the reason for my trip, my job ... I rarely take taxis (my editor, who knows my phobia, links this to Lucile); the truth is that I always end up feeling sick in the back of cars. This morning however I made an
effort to answer the driver, a little evasively at first, and then as he persisted, I ended up telling him that I was a writer.
‘What caused that?’ he asked me, exactly as though it were an illness, or even a punishment or a curse.
In the rear-view mirror he looked at me sympathetically.
What caused that?
When I meet readers in libraries, bookshops or schools, I’m often asked why I write.
I write because of 31 January 1980.
Confusedly, I know that the origin of my writing is there, in those few hours which caused our lives to fall apart, in the days which preceded it and the time of isolation which followed.
I remember hearing that my mother had the same illness as Barbara, Liane’s sister, who for several years, in a desperate repeating cycle, veered between bouts of delirium and periods of profound apathy. The illness had been passed on from one to the other, that was all. As if it were as simple as that: hereditary madness passed from generation to generation by a complex route, a calamity which affected the women in the family and about which nothing could be done. Liane would sigh in the kitchen, with that sad look, her hands cradling her warm teacup. It was in the blood, it had to be coped with, it took patience; and after several years, Barbara had stabilised, had stopped going in and out of hospital, and came through it. And Liane would conclude by saying: ‘Close the door, my princess. It’s freezing.’
★
There were only a few weeks between the Apostrophes programme and Lucile’s first crisis. I had never taken stock of this timing; in my memory these two events were not so close. That’s not significant. Thanks to the INA archives, I was able to watch the programme again. I had forgotten what it was like. My memory was of the television room at Pierremont, imbued with the solemn tension of the moment. I think Lucile was there with us but I’m not sure. I felt emotional watching Barbara and Claude’s performance, though I only vaguely knew them, the way you know people you meet at funerals and family get-togethers (which is to say, they were two complete strangers). They are both dead now. On Apostrophes, they are sitting side by side, as though they are joined; his attention is entirely on her, and vice versa; everything else seems of secondary importance. Both of them talk about the hollow years from which they have emerged, the series of committals, the pain he experienced when he had to sign the papers, the letters she sent from hospital asking for a divorce. She is beautiful and has incredible presence and much more charisma than him. He takes her hand several times, she smiles when he mentions his somewhat fickle past, ‘Let him who has never done the same cast the first stone at me,’ he adds with conviction. With great dignity, she laughs.
I had never read their book. I ordered it on the Internet, where you can still find it second-hand. There have always been very close ties between Barbara’s family and my grandmother’s. It was thanks to Barbara, I remembered, that Liane and Georges met. And then thanks to Georges that Barbara met Claude, her second husband. There was just three years’ difference in age between
the two sisters and they both raised large families, like their own mother. Though they were very different, it seems to me that they shared (except during Barbara’s periods of illness) the same elemental force drawn from the earth, an inextinguishable energy, a gift for life. Both of them had faith in love and both laid claim to the limitless devotion which, they thought, a wife ought to show towards her husband. Both of them married men with strong personalities who needed to be the centre of attention. They were pious without being sanctimonious (their conception of religion, it seems to me, in no way excluded physical pleasures) and strongly marked by the education they had received.
In Deux et la folie, Barbara mentions the death of their two brothers one year apart, both scarcely out their teens: one following a war injury in Indochina which was mistreated, and the other from pneumonia after a swim in an icy river. By one of those detours that delirium takes, these deaths also came back during her first crisis, as though she bore some responsibility.
In the course of my research for this book, I learned that some of my grandmother’s sisters were very probably sexually abused by their father when they were girls. Barbara makes no mention of that.
I have never really been interested in psychogenealogy nor in phenomena transmitted from one generation to another, which fascinate some of my friends. I don’t know how these things (incest, child mortality, suicide, madness) might be passed on.
The fact is that they run all the way through families like pitiless curses, leaving imprints which resist time and denial.
L ucile stayed at Maison Blanche for twelve days. She received several visitors, including Forrest, some of her brothers and sisters, and friends from the Maison des Chats. A few days after her arrival, she was told of the death of Baptiste, Barbara and Claude’s son. He had shot himself in the head. If the pact was genuine, Baptiste was part of it. He was the third and last of the so-called ‘suicide wave’.
Lucile left Maison Blanche before the delirium subsided. She had only seen the psychiatrist twice, once on admission and once on discharge, and as a result of the many injections she had had, she hadn’t suffered. Lisbeth enabled her to avoid a hospitalisation order by taking her home with her along with medication Lucile refused to swallow. The situation rapidly became impossible. To the great delight of Lisbeth’s children, Lucile didn’t do as she was told, she messed around, and kept coming up with new tricks and schemes to escape. Crawling across the carpet on all fours, she tried to make it to the door while her sister had her back turned and invented unlikely appointments in order to get out. When she was locked in, she said anything that went through her head in a continuous stream after her years of silence.
Gabriel had begun the process to regain custody of us.
Lucile, who had just got out of hospital and was still in a delirious
state, made a first appearance before the judge. Accompamed by a friend and scarcely able to stand, she cried, laughed uproariously, made puns and noisily demanded a cigarette (though she had been recommended not to smoke). Eventually the judge gave her a Camel.
A background report was ordered.
One Saturday in the days that followed, Lucile rang us in Normandy. She asked to speak to each of us in turn, asked the same questions several times, kept changing her mind about which one of us she wanted to speak to, enquired about the weather. She asked Manon to describe her toys and made me repeat the same words, still convinced that I was the Delphic oracle. The conversation lasted over an hour. It was the only contact we had with her for several months.
Lucile eventually escaped from Lisbeth and fled to Barcelona, where she moved in with Milo’s best friend. Henri and Nuria received her with great kindness, despite the agitated state she was in. They showed her the city, accompanied her on her adventures. In a few days she amassed a vast number of objects: fountain pens, painted plaster Jesuses, a collection of little cactuses.
At this time, Barthelemy, who worked for a supplement of Liberation, had them publish the text which Baptiste had written a few days before his death.
Lucile returned to Paris, resumed her wandering, and gave money away in the street. Those close to her began to think that she was
going to have to be hospitalised again. Lisbeth and Michel B., one ofViolette’s friends, spent a day with her in the hope of taking her gently to the emergency services at Saint-Antoine Hospital. Lucile demanded they stop at cafes, danced on tables, sang old songs by the sixties singer Sheila, delaying the moment of her imprisonment. Once she got there, she commented on the body of the doctor who admitted her and expressed concern about his mental health when she discovered that he was left-handed (as she was). In the ambulance which took her back to Maison Blanche, Lucile again sang at the top of her voice and ordered the driver to go faster (though she was usually terrified in cars).
A few days went by before Lucile was transferred to Belle-Allee clinic near Orleans, where she spent three or four months. A treatment plan was put in place, Lucile saw doctors several times a day but remained in a delirious state despite her medication.
In the texts which she wrote later, Lucile recalled the subjects of her fantasies: painting, the Philokalia, mythology (Aphrodite and Apollo), the architecture of Viollet-le-Duc, Les Tres Riches Heures du due de Berry.
(Another sentence I read in Gerard Garouste’s book, said by his doctor: ‘You have deliriums that stem from your cultural background.’)
Lucile sent us some letters from Belle-Allee in which she tried to describe her life in the clinic, how she spent her time, the doctors who were treating her. We wrote back reassuringly, telling her about our schools, our activities, our new friends (Lucile kept all
our letters from when we were children; we found them in her flat after her death).
After a few weeks, the delirium eventually subsided. It was followed by shame; a grubby, guilty sense of shame that would never leave her.
Lucile opened her eyes and saw her life in ruins. She was about to lose custody of her children, she had spent money she didn’t have, she had said and done foolish things.
It had happened. It couldn’t be fixed.
Several months later, when her condition seemed to have stabilised, Lucile eventually came out of the clinic. She returned to the apartment on the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and went back to her job while her dismissal procedure was going through.
Shortly before the summer, the time came for us to see her again. The weekend had been organised far in advance; it had been arranged that she wouldn’t come to get us alone. Gabriel drove us to the station at Verneuil-sur-Avre. All three of us cried in the car.
In the tram which we now took in the opposite direction, we tried to prepare ourselves for the reunion ahead. Our apprehension grew ever greater. We were unable to play any of our usual guessing games.
When we got to the Gare Montparnasse, we walked side by side towards the exit, feeling more fear than joy.
★
Lucile was at the end of the platform, amid the bustling crowd, a tiny blonde figure wrapped in a navy blue coat. Lucile was there, with Violette and a friend, near us now, and suddenly there was no other face but hers, pale and thin. Lucile kissed us undemonstratively, none of us knew what to do with our arms, and our legs weren’t holding up too well either.
We set off towards the metro. Lucile took Manon’s hand. She was walking ahead of me. I looked at her back, how frail and fragile and broken she looked. She turned round and smiled at me.
Lucile had become a tiny little thing — breakable, glued together, patched up — irreparable, in truth.
Of all the images I have retained of my mother, this one is probably the most painful.
T he custody assessment took place in the months following her discharge from the clinic. On several occasions we were asked to meet psychologists and psychiatrists, to take tests, answer questions, draw families and houses on blank sheets of paper and colour them in with felt-tips.
Lucile, Gabriel, his wife Marie-Anne, and some other family members were interviewed too.
At the end of the assessment, the medico-psychological report recommended that custody of the children be granted to Gabriel, with substantial visiting rights and overnight stays for Lucile.
At the same time, Lucile was dismissed from her job and had her bank account closed. She was thirty-three and had lost almost everything in life that kept her going.
For a few months she continued to pay for the apartment on the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, which had become too big for her, in the hope that we would be coming back. She signed on, took an intensive English course, and let herself be lulled by a distant echo, which reached her only in snatches.
For several years, Lucile lived on antipsychotics.
Her expression was fixed, clouded over, as though a grimy film covered her eyes. Behind those eyes, you could guess at the pills
taken to a set timetable, the drops diluted in glasses of water — and time stretching ahead of her, unchanging. You couldn’t catch her eye; she stared at the ground or just above it, a little below the horizon.
Sometimes Lucile’s mouth remained open without her realising and she would yawn wide enough to dislocate her jaw. Her hands trembled because of the medication, as did her leg when she was sitting down; it would jerk even more noticeably, in a way that she couldn’t control. When Lucile was walking, with her arms folded at waist height, her hands looked like two corpses. Lucile was like everyone who takes high doses of an tipsy chotics: their eyes are the same, they stand in the same way, their movements look mechanical. They are far away, as though cocooned from the world; nothing seems able to reach them; their emotions are contained, regulated, controlled.
It was unbearable seeing Lucile like that. There were no words that could translate the feelings of revolt or pain, just sometimes the desire to shake her to get some reaction from her: a laugh, a sob, a tiny cry.
She didn’t emerge from this state of lethargy until she returned to one of delirium a few years later. In the meantime, she was trying to survive, to fill the time, which was now so empty.
Violette would call her and encourage her to go out. She’d take her to the cinema, where Lucile nearly always fell asleep.
On the Sundays when we weren’t there, Lucile would meet friends at the swimming pool. There, as elsewhere, it was a case of keeping her head above water.
★
Every other weekend, we took the train to see her. She would be waiting at the Gare Montparnasse. We’d catch the metro to Rue Montmartre, a station that’s since been renamed and whose endless stairs would turn our legs to jelly, as if that were needed. Yet as the months passed, a tentative, fragile bond developed.
Lucile wanted to hear about our new life: we told her about our little brother, school, friends, neighbours, the horse, tap dancing, the dogs, the canteen — but we weren’t really saying anything in our letters or face to face. There wasn’t anything that could be said.
Lucile would invite our childhood friends round on those weekends, would be attentive to us, try in her way to make things nicer.
I rediscovered memories of a time long gone. I wandered with my friends on the boulevards, went to the cinema.
I think this was the period when, with some of my friends, I invented the game of‘Maitre Capello’, a parody of a TV programme, which we recorded on a tape recorder and was the source of much hilarity.
Lucile didn’t read any more. She didn’t go to the art exhibitions she used to love. When we weren’t there, she lay on her bed for hours, staring into space. Lucile was being treated by a psychiatrist, who prescribed her drugs, and a psychotherapist, whom she saw twice a week and who was working with her long-term, though their sessions faced the obstacle of her silence. Lucile had nothing to say.
She was struggling to give us her least damaged, least exhausted side; she was struggling to remain in life. It was for us that Lucile
got up and dressed, put make-up on. For us she went out and bought cakes for Sunday lunch.
Each act cost her dear; that was impossible for us to miss.
For a few months, Lucile had been looking for a secretarial job and had responded to three or four ads in her trembling handwriting. But the fact was she was incapable of getting through a job interview.
When she ran out of money to keep on the apartment on the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, she moved in to a little two-room courtyard flat, on the rue des Entrepreneurs in the fifteenth arrondis- sement, with the support of some friends and relatives.
The following spring, the excitement about the 1981 presidential election seemed to draw Lucile out of her silence. For the first time in ages, she appeared concerned about something external to herself and us. She hesitantly expressed a wish — which was very rare — and tried to explain why to me. From these conversations I concluded that Francois Mitterrand was clearly the man of the future: our saviour. Francois Mitterrand personified renewal, afresh start — words which were very precious to Lucile — all her hopes combined, tangible proof that she was still one of us. Mitterand’s ‘peaceful force’ - that was what we needed — and for the walls of silence and loneliness to gently tumble down.
I had just turned fifteen. I rebelled against Gabriel the only way I could. I wanted to talk about the death penalty, I wanted to talk about social determinism, I wanted to talk about underdeveloped
countries, denounce the limited life of provincial worthies. I turned up the volume on my record player to listen to my records, among which the singer Renaud figured prominently Over and over he sang: ‘Society, society, you won’t get me.’ I’d had enough of dreams of comfort and conformity, of peaceful middle-class life, of plush carpet and immaculate interiors: I had become a rebel.
At just after 8 p.m. on io May 1981, in the train taking us back from a febrile weekend with Lucile (we had gone right into the polling booth with her), a triumphant ticket inspector went through the carriages announcing that the left had won. Half the passengers cheered, while the rest greeted the news with appalled silence. Mobile phones didn’t exist; we absorbed the messenger’s words: yes, he was sure, he’d heard it on the driver’s radio, which was linked to the control room; it was definite, absolutely certain, around 52 per cent of the vote. Between Versailles and Dreux stations, as the train travelled through the countryside, it struck me that we were saved. Francois Mitterrand was President of the Republic.
When we got off the tram, our feet trod new ground. As darkness fell, a shining path had opened up before us, a path whose victories, twists and setbacks were still unknown. Gabriel had come to fetch us from the station. He was tense, as he always was when we came back from Paris, and he was tense because Francois Mitterrand had just won.
That evening, I fell asleep thinking of my mother. I imagined her in the Place de la Bastille, though I knew she was incapable of
going there. I imagined her amid a jubilant, ever-growing crowd: Lucile dancing, twirling her floral skirt, Lucile happy.
A few months later, I listened over and over to the song by Barbara about that day in 1981 and the hopes it still embodied:
Look! Something has changed, the air seems lighter - it’s indefinable.
Look! Under a sky that’s clearing, everything’s sunny — it’s indefinable.
A man with a rose in his hand has opened the way to a different fiuture . . .
People want to talk, to love, to touch.
And start everything afresh.
U ltimately, I don’t know what the point of all this research is, nor what will remain of the hours spent rummaging through cardboard boxes; listening to cassettes distorted with age; rereading administrative documents, police and medico-psychological reports, texts infused with pain; comparing sources, statements, photographs.
I don’t know what the cause of it is.
But the further I go, the deeper my conviction that it was something I had to do, not as an act of rehabilitation, nor to honour, prove, re-establish, reveal or repair something, solely to get closer. Both for myself and for my children — who, despite my efforts, feel the weight of distant fears and regrets — I wanted to go back to the source of things.
And I wanted some trace of this quest, however futile, to remain.
I am writing this book because I now have the strength to examine what troubles and sometimes assails me, because I want to know what I am passing on. I want to stop being afraid that something will happen to us, as though we were living under a curse, and to be able to make the most of my good fortune, my energy, my happiness, without thinking that something terrible is going to destroy us and that sadness is forever waiting in the wings.
★
My children are growing up and even if it is very banal to say how amazing and overwhelming I find that, I will say it: my children are their own beings; their personalities make me feel awe and delight; I love a man whose path unexpectedly crossed mine (or the other way round), who is both very similar to and very different from me, whose unexpected love simultaneously fulfils, amazes and fortifies me. It is now 10.44 a - m - and I am sitting at my old PC, whose slowness I curse but whose memory I love. Today I know how fragile all this is and that now, with the strength I have regained, I must write to the end.
Tears can wait.
Approaching Lucile, whether very cautiously or with my sleeves rolled up, also means approaching other people, living people, with the risk of ending up more distant from them. My sister was one of the people I asked to talk to me about Lucile, to share their memories with me.
Manon told me about that January morning, and how impossible she found it for months afterwards to go to sleep in Lucile’s presence, her childhood nights haunted by the fear that her mother would burst into her room to finish what she had begun. That affected me deeply.
Manon told me about the subsequent years from her point of view, the silent onlookers that we became, unable to stop Lucile’s suffering.
Manon told me many other things which have nourished this book and which I hope I have not misrepresented.
Manon made me promise to destroy the recording of the long
conversation we had (which I did). Soon after, she sent me two texts that she had written, one following our meeting and the other just after Lucile’s death.
Coming from Manon, who is so private, this was a splendid gift
Of the period which followed Lucile’s committal, few traces remain. The police report is wretched and relatively vague. The custody assessment that Gabriel gave me, addressed to the family court in Paris a year after Lucile was hospitalised, refers to the various interviews which led to a recommendation in Gabriel’s favour. It describes in broad terms the personalities as they appeared to the psychiatrists, and compares the different viewpoints of my parents, both of whom were seeking custody. Lucile’s concerns about her ex-husband’s violence or the secluded environment in which she fears we would live are mentioned, as are Gabriel’s doubts about his ex-wife’s ability to look after us and the way we had previously been left to fend for ourselves. Both of us were careful not to reply to the question of whether we would prefer to live with our mother or our father. The psychiatrists emphasised our wish to stay out of parental conflict. And as for me, the personality test revealed a strong desire for independence.
What Lucile had to say about the months that followed her hospitalisation bear the mark of guilt and great sadness.
Of the weekends when we began to visit her again, she writes:
‘Organising these two days worries me the whole fortnight: meeting at the Gare Montparnasse, the train, which is often late, what we re going to eat, and especially what we’re going to do and talk about. With them too I have no voice. I don’t know how to talk to them any more. I have fallen from my pedestal as a mother. Even face to face with them I no longer exist, yet seeing them is my only profound pleasure/pain in this life. Despair of these days flowing by one after the other, with no vital thread or chopped in pieces.