Gaël Tchakaloff and Léa Vicens, a mano a mano full of admiration in the book “La vie à mort”

First encounters are always the result of chance. Lasting relationships often owe nothing to it. The writer Gaël Tchakaloff and the mounted bullfighter Léa Vicens had no reason to know each other, much less to love each other, the former being very reluctant to Spanish bullfighting, the latter having devoted her entire life to it.

But sometimes fate intervenes, and the cards are reshuffled. It is on the pages of a New York Times abandoned in a Parisian bus that the writer discovers the existence of the Nîmes rejoneadora. On reading the article, Gaël Tchakaloff is captivated.Something had grabbed me, something in the realm of strangeness. I had said to myself ‘this is crazy, an arena is a place where death is given, while a woman can give life’. There were ambiguities that I had noted, that interested me. Then I had forgotten, because I was writing on other subjects.“, says the author, who was then interested in bullfighting on an intellectual level, but was unable to bear the sight of a bullfight, to face the killing of a bull.