The writer Mazarine Mitterrand Pingeot has tackled a subject that could not be more intimate with her latest work, 11 quai Branly. She opened the doors to her childhood in the Alma Palace where she lived in secret for seven years, until she fled to survive.
Mazarine Mitterrand Pingeot: From a 300 square meter apartment to a two-room apartment, this life choice she made to get better
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Living in a 300 square meter apartment in the heart of Paris, this is a childhood that could be described as golden. However, that of Mazarine Pingeot can first be described as complex. Not because of this sumptuous setting but the context is not obvious. Born in 1974, she lived in hiding for 20 years, having been the illegitimate daughter of the President of the Republic François Mitterrand. A secret life at Alma, precisely in a staff apartment located in the national palace of the French Republic, located in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, which is at the heart of his latest book, 11 quai Branly (editions Flammarion) and mentioned in the pages of the Weekend supplement of Parisian.
From the age of 9 to 16, Mazarine Pingeot, the daughter of the politician who died in 1996 with the art historian and curator Anne Pingeot, lived on Quai Branly in an apartment that she describes as large and freezing. In her mid-adolescence, she couldn’t take it anymore and preferred to move into her mother’s two-room apartment on rue Jacob in the 6th arrondissement. A narrow place but which she describes as a cocoon and where she had already lived when she was little. There, she was able to regain a bit of her identity, previously comparing herself to spies who have a double life, except that she had no choice: “My life was hampered.“
Mazarine Pingeot in a worrying psychological state at 16
When Mazarine Pingeot left Alma at 16, she was in a very complicated psychological state, in depression. In Paris Matchthe associate professor of philosophy explained: “I no longer had any desire. I am determined and I relied on my will which could no longer do anything for me. I was empty. The emotional connection to things was severed. I was like anesthetized. Psychoanalysis brought me an unraveling. Clairvoyance on certain aspects of my life and help to feel less guilty. I felt excessive guilt and was afraid of hurting others. I learned to make decisions that are important to me.“
However, Mazarine Pingeot would like to point out that the situation is difficult but not the bond with her parents: “I couldn’t stay any longer. I loved my parents and never did anything against them, but there was no other way. I am cerebral but I was, at the time, incapable of thinking about what I was doing. I left because I felt like I was going to die. I answered the call of the living.“
The woman of letters, mother of three children and married in 2014 to the diplomat Didier Le Bret, looks at this life with an elegant and exciting perspective, who in 2016 obtained the change of her name to “Mitterrand Pingeot”. Sharing with the public pieces of this life which came to light in 1994 and which has continued to fascinate.
