Par
Marie-Madeleine Remoleur
Published on
Nov 17 2024 at 6:30 p.m
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“Make a word the beautiful lover of a sentence”. In front of the library, the street art work of Miss Tic seals on the walls of Trouville-sur-Mer (Calvados) the common history of Marguerite Duras and the Queen of Beaches. “She’s still there,” confirms Marie-Thérèse Gibourdelwho knew her for years, when the writer and filmmaker came to her pastry shop Charlotte Corday.
40 years ago, in November 1984, Marguerite Duras won the Prix Goncourt for The Lover. A work, like so many others, where we feel the inspiration of Trouville, a Normandy station which still treasures, in people’s minds or in its walls, the passage of the writer. Today, a stairs bears his name, a former hotel, the Black Rocksremains closely linked to the woman who lived and wrote there. And in the heads of those who knew her, read her or encountered her ghost, Marguerite Duras remains.
A refuge for writing
In 1963Marguerite Duras buys an apartment in Trouville, on the first floor of the former Roches Noires hotel. A place where, before her, Marcel Proust had lived, and where she loved to write. “To look at the sea is to look at the whole”one of her quotes, is still affixed to the entrance to the building where she stayed for long periods, from 1963 to his death in 1996.
“Trouville was first a place that allowed him to write in a certain solitude. It was a kind of refuge, a retreat, which she frequented quite sparingly,” says Alain Vircondeletone of the most recognized biographers of Marguerite Duras who has just published The last secret of Marguerite Duras.
At the heart of the Queen of Beaches, the writer particularly loved the sea. “Trouville was at the heart of her work between 1980 and 1993, a place carrying his imagination and his work. There is always this reminiscence of waterthis sea that she called the illegible, in perpetual movement, a sort of mystery of the world which reminded her of her past. Yet far from her native Indochina, Marguerite Duras found in Trouville “ a sort of place of memory “. Alain Vircondelet adds: “This apartment reminded him large estates and embassies that she had seen when she was younger. She found, in a way, reminiscences in Trouville of what she had experienced during her stays in Indochina, the Roches Noires were like a continuity of her imagination.”
“She had a captivating voice”
For the writer, Trouville was a place of inspiration, but also a place for getaways and meetingssurveying the country of Auge and its addresses, notably in Central where she had her table, and the pastry Charlotte Corday.
She came almost every day to eat at the shop for lunch, at the same table, on the street side. She ate a little quiche, and we talked all afternoon.
However, before entering the boutique for the first time, Marguerite Duras thought that “it was too chic for her”.
For the Trouvillaise, these moments of sharing with the one who became his friend remain anchored in his memory. “She really had a captivating voiceelle told me his whole life », smiles the one who, over the years, has become a true confidante. “I am quite talkative and listen to people, Marguerite told me all about her life: the liberation of her husband in Germany with François Mitterand, her dead child. It was very personal, but still enriching “. A mutual enrichment. “Marguerite Duras opened my mind to many authors and directors with whom she worked,” says Marie-Thérèse.
For her part, the Trouvillaise told the writer the stories she made up for her granddaughter. “She told me that I should write them, and it’s true that I should have,” smiles Marie-Thérèse tenderly. For Marguerite Duras, she was also an advisor for exploring the region. “Since 1980, with his companion Yann Andrea and the photographer Helene Bambergerthey were going to ride in the afternoon, surveying the region. I recommended cemeteries, chapels to him…”.
Stories, memories, Marie-Thérèse has a lot to tell. Intimate stories, others that make you smile. “Sometimes, customers came in and asked her if she was Marguerite Duras. She replied that she looked a lot like him, but that it wasn’t her. I was laughing behind my counter.”
“His ghost still hovers in Trouville”
Nearly 30 years after her disappearance, what remains of Marguerite Duras in Trouville? “She left a real mark,” considers Marie-Thérèse. “Les Roches Noires, the staircase that bears her name, the boardwalk where she took her morning walk, the Central, Charlotte Corday: we like to return to the places she loved. It’s a climate that is Durassian, very literary,” considers Alain Vircondelet.
If the Rencontres Marguerite Duras, which for many years made it possible to honor her memory, disappeared from Trouville in 2022, following a decision by the Municipality, her legacy remains, and continues to inspire and supporteven those who did not know her.
Like Vincent Jaglin who settled in Trouville 16 years ago, “thanks to her”. A decision made, a few years after her first encounter with the ghost of the writer.
It was in 2002, I was on the road and I decided to pass through Trouville. By chance, I took the Corniche road which falls on the Roches Noires. I felt a very strong aesthetic emotion in front of the landscape, and I came across the ghost of Marguerite, with the plaque in her name. At the time, for me, it only boiled down to Hiroshima, my love.
A few years after this first “meeting”, he settled in 2008 to Trouville for her, to relive this “traveling shot” of the Corniche road again and again, to “get closer to her work” and to fight against addiction. “It’s thanks to Marguerite Duras, to her speeches, her writings, her recordings, that I stopped drinking,” he confides. A fight that he recounts in his film Marguerite’s ghosts. “A few years ago, I met Jean Mascolo at Roches Noires, I told him: your mother saved me.”
This link with Marguerite Duras allowed him to build real friendships and opened the doors to its living spaces. With the author’s son, but also with Marie-Thérèse Gibourdel, who became her “best friend” or even with the woman who today shares her life, Federica LautoItalian psychoanalyst and writer.
Two years ago, she contacted me because she was writing a biographical novel around the places in Duras. We met, we never stopped writing to each other and we live together. There is a Duras magic, his ghost creates real encounters.
Always ” modern and up to date », According to Vincent, Marguerite Duras is also still very present in Trouville. ” I have a very intimate relationship with ghostsso I see her and I feel her everywhere in Trouville,” he smiles, before listing: “She is there very intensely at Roches Noirs, but also rue de Londres which was his favorite, at the entrance to the library with his quote As soon as I move away from Trouville, I have the feeling of losing light. It is there in the lights, in certain high tides when the sea recedes very far. His ghost still hovers over Trouville.”
The stretches of sand “reminded him of the Mekong”
In the photo book Chez Marguerite Duras which has just been published, Catherine Faux revisits in images the places where Marguerite Duras lived. “I have mainly done portraits in my career as a photographer. Then I found Jean Mascolo (son of Marguerite Duras, editor’s note) in 1998. Being often in Marguerite Duras’ places, I felt the desire to photograph these places as if they were characters. says Catherine Faux.
“Marguerite says it herself, it was after buying Neauphle that she really started writing. It was the first time she was truly at home. Previously she was not an owner. All her life she rented the apartment on rue Saint-Benoît where, after the war, she and her husband received their intellectual friends. She was writing on the corner of the table. In Neauphle-le-Château, she thus began writing.
Normandy was also a place of inspiration for her. “She also wrote a lot in Trouville. She often went to the Gallimards in Benerville-sur-Mer. When she learned that an apartment was for sale in Roches Noires, she immediately bought it. The immense expanses of sand in front of the Roches Noires reminded him of the Mekong. She loved driving around in the surrounding areas which were sources of inspiration.”
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