Claude Sarraute left us on June 20, 2023 at the age of 95. Important journalist who collaborated on Monde notably, she had returned to the forefront thanks to Laurent Ruquier and his show We tried everythingbut also The Big Headsa program in which she already participated with Philippe Bouvard.
If everyone knows who Claude Sarraute is, few people know his private life. She was married three times and had four children: Laurent and Martin, born from her second union with Christophe Tzara, and Nicolas and Véronique, the children of her last husband, the philosopher Jean-François Revel. She was also close to his two children: Eve and Matthieu Ricard.
The first is a writer and he is a Buddhist monk. He is even the official translator of the Dalai Lama in France. Although he lives in Nepal most of the time, he has already participated in numerous television sets in France where he promoted his works. In one of them, in fact, he had mentioned his relationship with his mother-in-law Claude Sarraute. It was in his autobiography Notebooks of a Wandering Monk.
Reports that arrived late
It was already at the age of a young adult that Matthieu Ricard met Claude Sarraute. Her father married her shortly before his first trip to India, and they had a child together in 1966. But it was not at this time that he became closer to her but much later.
They had attended together, with the other children of Jean-François Revel, the funeral of the philosopher in 2006. In his autobiography, he returns to this sad death and confides about his father and Claude Sarraute: “In 2006, I spent an entire year in retreat in my hermitage. This retreat was, however, interrupted for a few weeks by a trip to France to visit my father who was dying in the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital. I was thus able to spend the last fifteen days of his life with him. He appeared calm and serene, which was not his dominant trait, and effusively thanked everyone who took care of him. (…) The news was announced on Sunday morning. In the evening, we gathered at my brother Nicolas’s house. On the twenty-hour news, the first headline was: ‘The philosopher Jean-François Revel is dead. He may be one of the last independent minds leaving. He will be remembered in particular for the dialogue he had with his Buddhist monk son Matthieu Ricard, The Monk and the Philosopher.’ Some images of our meeting followed. I made myself very small, because, in Claude’s eyes [Sarraute]my father had done The Monk and the Philosopher to please myself and this book constituted an ‘accident’ in his career.”
A remark which would therefore not have tainted the relationship between the famous monk and the journalist.
