En April 2010, Frédéric Boyer, writer, editor, translator of Virgil and Saint Augustine, went to Écommoy, in Sarthe, “thinking that seeing the places would soothe the imagination or dry it up”. A few months earlier, he discovered in the newspapers the ordeal endured by an 8-year-old girl, who died after a life of abuse inflicted by her parents.
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A story that continues to haunt him, as if it had been “personally” addressed to him. When is a child confronted with violence, and what repercussions does this violence have on his adult life, he wondered in his previous book, The Hare (Gallimard, 2021).
The devil's part
Extending this questioning, Si petite questions our relationship to evil “to unmask not evil itself” but “the imposture of our situation in the face of evil”. An imposture lodged in the individual sphere (“I can't do it with her”, justified the mother, who declared her “disappeared”) as well as in the collective sphere: in June 2008, in fact, the director of the school where the little girl was attending school, the Le Mans prosecutor's office was questioned for “suspicion of abuse”.
ALSO READ Sandrine Collette: “Young people need to hear something other than: “everything is going to blow””Social services and a doctor described the bruises, scratches and cuts as “boos” relating to “accidents of everyday life”. For each of the 19 scars noted on her body, the little one will give a reassuring explanation to protect her parents. In two years, the family changed homes six times. At the end of August 2009, they moved to Lavardin, where their children were quickly enrolled in school. The little one has already succumbed to her injuries.
“The part of fiction that we add to our stories is both the part of the devil and that of our fear, of our helplessness in the face of bare facts,” writes Frédéric Boyer. It took him fifteen years to put words to this affair. Words whose strength and accuracy make Si petite a very great book, one of those to which we return when doubt assails us.
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
“Si petite”by Frédéric Boyer (Gallimard, 128 p., €14).
