“I don’t think I’ll ever meet anyone like that again,” reacts, Thursday November 7, on franceinfo, Jean-David Morvan, screenwriter and author of comics, co-author with Dominique Bertail of Madeleine, resistant. Madeleine Riffaud, resistance fighter, poet, writer, journalist and war correspondent, died Wednesday at the age of 100.
Jean-David Morvan loses the one he considered one of his “best friends” despite their 45 years apart. It describes a relationship “Magnificent”. Madeleine Riffaud “had experienced so much”elle “had so much to teach me”, he continues. Jean-David Morvan remembers their exchange when he called her for him “asked if she wanted to do comics. She replied: ‘No matter what, I’ll be put in all the sauces’he says, imitating her. Finally, she agreed and it was an incredible life change.” because Madeleine Riffaud, was really “exceptional, I’m still in love with her.” He insists because this “sincere friendship” l’a “enormously enriched”.
“Madeleine told me: ‘You’ll see, you’ll live very well with me, without me.’ There it is, it begins… (And for the moment, I’m not experiencing it very well)”wrote Jean-David Morvan on his Facebook page. “I won’t see her anymore.” while “I spent seven years with her. I practically lived at her house in the Marais in Paris, two or three days a week”, adds the comic book author who lives in Reims on franceinfo. He was on the train with Dominique Bertail when he learned of the death of Madeleine Riffaud. They were going to Paris to visit him.
Jean-David Morvan co-wrote a text to pay tribute to Madeleine Riffaud, “a woman who is astonishingly lucid about the world as it is not working, nourished by her life experience, fearing being taken over by one or the other, which will certainly happen nonetheless”. He specifies that she “listened to franceinfo all day”including in the evening when, according to her, “journalists say what they dare not say during the day.”
Co-author of Madeleine, resistanthe is “super proud to have brought it back to its place in the history of France” because Madeleine Riffaud “was very famous until the 70s” then was somewhat forgotten by the younger generations.
In a press release, the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, “salutes the memory of this heroine of admirable and exemplary courage”. "I’m glad she said it," reacts a little bitterly Jean-David Morvan. “We asked her to make her a Knight of the Arts of Letters and we never got an answer, but Tom Cruise is certainly more interesting,” he quips. Madeleine Riffaud’s friend believes that she “well deserved” a national tribute “because she told a sort of counter-story to the national novel of the end of the 20th century” but, he continues, “it will be up to the Nation to decide.”
