It is Saturday December 23, 2023 that Clémentine Vergnaud (journalist on the franceinfo web service), who has been battling bile duct cancer since June 2022left us. She died at just 31 years old. Guest by Faustine Bollaert on RTL for his Heroes podcasther husband Grégoire Lecalot, also a journalist, spoke this Thursday, October 31, 2024. He returned to their meeting, the age gap, their long-distance relationship but also this moment when she taught him the fateful new. A moment when the couple was at odds, in his words.
“She called me, and I knew it was serious because at that time, we were a couple as I told you with age differences and therefore lives that were not quite the same. maturation stagehe confided. And at that time we had some small disagreements, so we were a bit at odds.“But that day, everything changed in the lives of Clémentine Vergnaud and her companion Grégoire Lecalot.”She calls me even though for several days, Clémentine had been a very stubborn person, so when she decided not to call anymore, she called more. So she calls me and I see myself again, I get up from my workstation, I go into the hallway and there she says these words to me, it was a little after 6 p.m., she says to me: 'I maybe cancer'. And there, I don't realize“, continues the journalist.
Clémentine Vergnaud's husband, Grégoire Lecalot remembers the first words
A moving testimony, during which he lets it be known to what extent he perceived that she was “extremely destabilized“. “I tell her to come immediately, I'll pick her up at her place, and we both spend the evening. She collapses in tears, out of fear, she tells me 'I don't want to die'. That was point A for me. 'I don't want to die', it goes from there. I immediately understand that everything else must be swept away. I understand that she needs me but me as a lover“, he reveals.
It is the beginning of a sad fight, the sad end of which we know. But Grégoire Lecalot, who as a reminder married her in the hospital, decided to hang on, and to concentrate on what Clémentine built during her existence. And on the background that they created for research on this cancer which is still too neglected, because still “rare“.
