2023-09-01 12:12:48
A great lady of literature has just died, a great lady through her works and in her life woven with culture. I had read and liked her first books as soon as they came out, and I didn’t meet her until much later. In 1974, with her first work, when the commandments of the New Roman were still followed, she made a new tone heard and began, thanks to a singular writing, an inner adventure to which she would remain faithful.
The title of this first novel already outlined its territory, vast and diverse, from the novel to the essay and to the translation, from the personal to the universal: Dans The revealing detail (1), it is about cruelty, about the inexplicable presence of Evil. Sybil, the heroine, is fascinated by what happened to a friend victim of her husband and by the mystery of this couple united by strange bonds. Like Sybil, the heroines of her other fictions engage in an investigation of traces, fragments, clues that can reveal and solve an enigma.
Question about Evil
Diane de Margerie was born in Paris, but, because of the career of her diplomat father, she lived for a long time abroad, in Germany, then towards her tenth year in China. It was there that she discovered misery, a frightening misery whose injustice she felt, which seemed not to move those around her. She also knew this country under Japanese occupation and suffering the cruelty of the occupier. Why this cruelty, which she would one day define as “absolute Evil”?
This questioning of evil was to haunt his work. These were years of solitude, in relative absence from her very busy parents, her father through his work, the socialities linked to his office and a hectic private life, his brilliant, very worldly, rather indifferent mother. Diane said one day that she only discovered her parents after their death, but she quickly understood that they led their lives each on their own and had nothing to do with a fusional couple.
The diplomatic milieu became for her a kind of metaphor for existence, for the comedy of life inevitably doomed to silence, to lies, to cruelty well hidden under a mask. News from the collection Duplicities (2) are as many searches from small daily details to the discovery of a sometimes unbearable truth. And the figure who most resembles her is the little girl who, fascinated by a perverted old butler, declares that she will always be like all those who observe, listen at the doors and are silent.
Haughty in the face of trials
It was around the time of the publication of Duplicities that I met her. I was inevitably very intimidated, then surprised and very happy with his friendship. She was born into a family linked, by descent, alliance or secret ties, to the big names in culture, Rostand, Fabre-Luce, Rilke, Proust, etc. Very simple in existence, haughty in the face of trials, she was above the baseness she ignored with superb elegance. Her conversation was dazzling, but the worldly rituals that had been her family’s daily life did not fascinate her, she did not chase power or media success. I had told him — because I meant it — that his Proust (3) was the best of the recently published works on the writer, she replied: “No! the best is Maman Michel Schneider! »
I never heard her speak ill of others, nor pass harsh judgments on them. The others, however, interested him. What she wanted to know was their childhood, what had caused the teenager or the adult they had become. One question haunted her: why are children often cruel? Where does the evil in them come from? This question, she asked herself: why did she love Japanese literature so much, steeped in sadism? It is this curiosity with regard to others, this taste for investigation, which attracted her to the translation of texts which she helped to discover or rediscover: Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton, John Cowper Powys, etc…
This is probably also what prompted her to turn to biography, the two most beautiful in my opinion being Edith Wharton, Readings of a Lifetime (4) et Aurora and George, who won the Prix Médicis de l’essai in 2004. How did little Aurore Dupin, of both aristocratic and popular origins, suffering in her childhood from the disunity of her parents, manage to become “George” by writing? For her, the trace left by the works was the only remedy against death.
It was the discovery of human misery in China, what she called “the hypocrisy of the Church”, which made her lose her faith. We had some brief and fascinating conversations on this subject. Like her, I had known pre-conciliar Catholicism, reduced to rigid morality, but for me it was about metaphysics and not morality. Like her, I admired the beauty of Chinese temples, but they were empty. She didn’t believe in an afterlife, and I do. And then, one day, she told me about two moments in her life when she had received a clear sign from elsewhere. “Yes, she said to me then, these are things that could prove you right. »
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