“A river like no other”

2023-08-16 18:38:17

“Dawn was far away and yet the river sparkled. » The first sentence of his voluminous saga The Esperance River – 1,500 pages, three volumes, five years of writing – Christian Signol experienced it as a liberating trigger. The floodgates of too long contained emotions opened, revealing on paper the secret source of one of his “childhood treasures”.

After having discovered the Dordogne in its tender years, the river “mythical and feared, dangerous and inspiring”senti “her supple legs, her soft seaweed hair, her green eyes and her velvet arms”, he will become the ample memoirist. The success in bookstores of his trilogy, amplified by the international impact of the serial adaptation on television in 1995, will enthrone him as a great popular writer and ensure him a status that has lasted for thirty years.

Childhood memories

“We lived six kilometers from its shores and my parents, worried about its reputation, forbade me to go there alone, says Christian Signol. I mainly frequented it when I was a teenager. In the summer, I used to go swimming, fishing and criss-crossing it every day in a flat-bottomed boat. It was a navigation of the happiness of living. » The future writer, nourished by this dazzling, will later evoke “the charm of those fiery summers where passions are fulfilled in the warm shade of the shores”.

The Dordogne flows through him: “I knew that one day I would write about her. » To tell the long, beautiful and tragic story of the barges, leaving Corrèze for Bordeaux, sunk by the arrival of the railway at the end of the 19th century, the writer travels from Puy de Sancy to the estuary of the Gironde. He wants to soak up its gentleness and its power before reconstructing this lost, submerged world.

Christian Signol has known the Dordogne river since his childhood. He lived, with his parents, six kilometers from its shores. / MICHELGRANGIER/STOCK.ADOBE.COM

After The Esperance RiverChristian Signol even identified with her in a first-person text written by her, Dordogne – See flowing together and the waters, and the days. Untraceable for a long time, the book has just come out at the aptly named Éditions du Ruisseau, in Sarlat, in a modified version, like its title, Dordogne, my river. He always comes back to it, attracted by it, to find it again and stay with it.

Along the water

Near Carennac (Lot), from March to November, it is not rare to see Christian Signol, sunk to the waist in the Dordogne where he practices, in silence, with dexterity and enchantment, fly fishing. “I am one with her, he admits. It surrounds me, I feel it vibrate. I have the impression of receiving his secrets, known only to me, his secrets from the dawn of time. »

Booted, equipped with waders with suspenders, the waterproof overalls of this aquatic corporation, he strikes trout, grayling, barbel and mutt in the shivering wave, which he hastens to throw back into the current. From his long hours of intimacy with the Dordogne, he retains the feeling of being outside the contemporary world, far from humans, integrated into the heart of a nature that accepts him.

And when he dives to swim, the sensual fascination takes on a new twist. “The water of the Dordogne is extraordinarily soft, like no other. Like a caress. Her scent, a sweetish mixture of moss and silt, of leaves and substrate, attaches me to her and attracts me. I recognize him from afar, instantly. »

Christian Signol, who never strays from it, suffers from seeing his Dordogne so low for a few years, altered by climate change. Her love story is not over. In two years, he will write a new novel about her. “Are we not alike?, he meditates on its shores. We men know that we are like rivers. Neither they nor we can go back and rewind time. »

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