The JDD. You have just received the Interallié 2024 prize. How do you receive the news?
Thibault de Montaigu. With a joy all the greater because this prize is linked to my childhood memories. In my grandfather's house, in the countryside, I remember discovering many authors who won this prize: Antoine Blondin, Michel Déon, Félicien Marceau, but also others less known like René Fallet and Roger Vailland, who have all nourished my imagination and my literary culture. Today, I am happy and proud to join this family!
It seems essential to me to remember where we come from, where our roots are.
Your work, Heart, is an investigation into your ancestor, Louis, captain of the hussars who fell in 1914 in a cavalry charge. Is it also a journey into a bygone era?
It is an exploration in a vanished world. In our time, which is all about speed and the virtual, it seems essential to me to remember where we come from, where our roots are, if only to know who we are. Even if the universe that I explore is a sort of submerged Proustian world, it continues with the memory of a certain French mythology, which I try to bring to life in this book.
You evoke a Proustian universe. The author ofIn search of lost timewhich we think of when reading you, was it a source of inspiration?
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Yes, he is a fundamental author for me. In the very last years of his life, my father reread it, or more precisely his partner Nancy read it to him. I too would like to go through this work again before leaving, we never finish discovering it! He is a world author, who contains everything. My father had returned to Proust, for the nostalgia of the submerged world, no doubt, but also for the great universal themes that he addresses: love, death, transmission…
As if this book and my father's heart were linked…
Why did you name your book with just one word, Heart ?
This is about my father's heart. He was suffering from heart failure, he was going to die. But what was fascinating to me was that every time I talked to him about my family investigation, I felt like I was bringing a little bit of life back to him. As if this book and my father's heart were linked, and that as long as I wrote, it would continue to beat…
Don't you worry that you signed with Heart your best book?
I had already been asked this question in my previous book, Grace (Plon, Prix de Flore 2020). People were worried about what else I could write after such a spiritual revelation. To answer your question, I don't know what God will give me as my next book, but I am certain of one thing: I will find myself alone again, in front of my page, because it is the activity that I prefer more in the world!
What do the Hussars’ ethics represent in your eyes? Is there a connection between the regiment to which your ancestor, Louis, belonged and the literary movement which took its name?
All things considered – because holding a pen is less risky than going to the front – the hussars, the military regiment like the literary movement, each embody in their own way a form of French panache. The soldiers of the Great War charged in poppy pants, out of pride and a taste for chic, without considering the additional risk to which they were exposed. Likewise, the eponymous literary movement, itself fond of panache, fascinated by the beautiful gesture, tended to favor style over substance. But in both cases, they were on the offensive!
