“Madelaine before dawn”, by Sandrine Collette, JC Lattès, 250 p., €20.90, digital €10.
Some abandoned children have skin so tough that they survive, grow strong, and eventually outshine the others. Madelaine before dawn is one of them. Sandrine Collette had initially abandoned this novel. She had written an almost complete first version when another idea made her drop everything to write We were wolves (JC Lattès, 2022).
At the end of 2022, after the success of this story about a man and his unwanted boy, the novelist wondered: what next? Should she pick up her manuscript again? She reread it. There was something. The wild and courageous little girl at the center of the book still spoke to her. The cold, the famines, too. The spark had come one spring marked by late frosts, a few years earlier. “In my village in Morvan, we had no fruit that yearshe remembers. No cherries. Rotten apples. So I read up on the great cold of the 18th century.e century. Like in 1709, when winter killed thousands of people. It was yesterday on the scale of humanity, and it could come back tomorrow. She had her subject.
In retrospect, however, the flaws in this manuscript, entitled “Grand Hiver,” are obvious to him. The first part, dense, is a little disorganized. The second lacks density. “Dilution”she judges. Sandrine Collette hesitates. She is thinking of a completely new project. Her editor at JC Lattès, Constance Trapenard, encourages her to take up her initial text again. But will it be different enough from the previous one, which also combined a very harsh nature and complex family relationships? “I was terrified of having to do it again We were wolves »she confides.
A decisive reversal
So she starts again from “Grand hiver”, but changes everything. For her second novel, A wind of ashes (Denoël, 2014), she had already torn up a first version, transformed the framework of the story and rewrote 80% of the text. This time, she threw the second part in the trash, and reconstructed the rest. The order of the sequences is disrupted. New characters appear, to complicate the story. She also adds a decisive reversal after 130 pages. Instead of the initial omniscient narrator, it is Bran, the closest companion of her protagonist, Madelaine, who says “I”. “I loved writing in the first person in We were wolves, explains the writer. It puts you so much inside the speaker…”
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