2023-06-20 18:55:34
DISAPPEARANCE – The picturesque columnist of Le Monde had become a pillar of RTL’s “Big Heads”. She was the wife of the philosopher Jean-François Revel.
In the end, she lived to the end with dignity, this earthy old lady who died at the age of 95, during the night of June 19 to 20, in her apartment on Île Saint-Louis, where she lived with her three successive husbands and always with Notre-Dame in front of her windows. Daughter of Nathalie Sarraute, figurehead of the New Roman, and wife of the great intellectual Jean-François Revel, whose life she shared for forty years, Claude Sarraute had managed to find a place in the sun between these two eminences of letters.
Born on July 24, 1927 in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, the one who wanted to be an actress for a while, after her schooling at the École alsacienne, had chosen to play in life the role of the false ingenue who says enormities while laughing, of the madwoman that she was not at all, the non-conformist that she was – like her brilliant husband. Behind her slang banter of a bistro owner from the 1950s, who used familiar terms and called everyone ” Babe “, ” Dear “ or ” sweetheart “there was a fine observer of manners and current affairs.
Some false ingenuities of Claude Sarraute…
A street girl style
She started working for The world in 1952, under the heading Shows then Television. From 1983 to 1992, she wrote a post that became famous, “Sur le vive”, where her street girl style and her irreverence towards the powerful titillated readers – she spoke of her “Mimi” and her “Jacquot about Mitterrand and Chirac, at a time when the evening paper did not mention the name of a politician without preceding it with “Monsieur”. And she was not satisfied with trussing harmless platitudes. In a Time.news of 1984, about the arrival of Omar Bongo in Paris, welcomed with Roman pomp by Mitterrand, whom Sarraute calls « My motto », she also alluded to the fact that the president, who advocated freedom of expression, was less scrupulous when it came to preventing the publication of articles on his private life. This Time.news had cost the boss of the Mondesays Ariane Chemin, in an article from 2014 where she has a very accurate expression about Claude Sarraute: “Coquette, rebellious and cleverly devoid of superego”.
To a journalist who asked her what her mother had passed on to her, Nathalie Sarraute’s daughter replied: “You had to work, and you shouldn’t be flirtatious or a liar. » Despite the admiration she had for her mother, Claude Sarraute had not learned the lesson. Worried about her appearance, novelist in her way of telling things seen by embroidering them with imagination, she loved television sets. At 90, weakened despite her tone, she came back to life as soon as she was in front of the cameras and the spotlights came on.
A dozen books
Because Claude Sarraute also had a radio and television career. His cow humor, his cheeky and burlesque verb did wonders for “Big heads” on RTL, at the time of Philippe Bouvard, and again, after 2014, with Laurent Ruquier. Claude Sarraute was a pillar of “the band in Ruquier”, intervening in particular on Europe 1 (“We won’t be embarrassed”), France 2 (“We tried everything”) or France Inter (“Nothing to wax”).
She had fallen in love with Jean-François Revel in 1957, while she was still married to Christophe Tzara, the son of the famous Dadaist, while reading his first book, why philosophers, advised by his mother. We regret that in the 800 pages of Mémoires of Jean-François Revel, there are only two allusions to Claude Sarraute, she who admired him so much (although she never hid that she had a titular lover).
Claude Sarraute also wrote a dozen books, « clowneries »she said, which could no more compare with those of her mother than Pif Gadget to the Research. In 1987, in The Literary FigaroRenaud Matignon had reviewed his first novel, Hello, Lolotte, it’s Cocogreeting his “naive and skeptical mind” and his art of “reveal a little of the truth” of her time, only regretting that she adds stylistic familiarity: “We do a little more Parisian to do a little less Parisian; and one senses that Madame Sarraute can speak slang in vain, it is always on the side of Saint-Honoré-d’Eylau. »
In 2017, to celebrate his 90th birthday, Claude Sarraute published a last book, one more moment (Flammarion), where she mixed memories and anecdotes about her old age, with her usual freedom of tone, and her sense of self-mockery, regretting that we only talk about old age with dread. She said: “Me, I want to proclaim: if you are lucky enough to get there, at a very advanced age, you risk being pleasantly surprised. Me, in fact, I love it. I’m terribly tired of being a big old woman. All my faults are accentuated: I say whatever comes into my head. » And so it was that Claude Sarraute, who said he had thought about suicide since his youth and who was a member of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, never decided to provoke his hour and died a beautiful death.
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