Sandrine Collette: “What interests me the most is seeing what ordinary people are capable of”

Sandrine Collette has always lived in the city before choosing the countryside. She who did not write, and did not publish before the age of 40, today, she delivers one of the books that is most talked about this literary rentrée: Madeleine avant l’aube published by JC Lattès. “Our Goncourt, it’s her” was the headline in Le Parisien a few days ago when talking about her book that is on the list of the prestigious prize. It is the eleventh novel by the writer who sold 100,000 copies of the previous one We were wolves. In this book, she continues to explore the wild territories that survive deep inside her. Here, through Madeleine, a rebellious and wild little girl who will turn a village upside down. Sandrine Collette is a novelist of instinct and the earth.

“Hungry Girl”

Her book is splendid, harsh, powerful and wild like her… We don’t know where the plot is set, or when. We imagine that we are before the French Revolution, somewhere in a very remote hamlet, isolated with a river where there are no more bridges. There, three families live, or rather they survive poorly at the rhythm of nature. There are two twin sisters who adore each other, one has three children, the other has not been able to have children. One night, a little girl arrives who is found in the morning in the henhouse. It is old Rose who comes across this hungry, disheveled and untamable little girl… They call her a “famine girl”. Sandrine Colette insists: “It’s a personal invention. Historically, it doesn’t exist. But everyone is starting to believe it, so I would simply like to correct it. A hunger girl is a little girl whose parents most likely died following the various famines. At that time, no one took in these children, it was too heavy to bear. And they were abandoned, they ended up dying.

Revolt comes with hunger

Madeleine will grow up between these three families, with the other children, and wake up these peasants frightened by the terrible lord, owner of the land, who beats them, rapes the women… But the little girl is not afraid, she does not obey the laws of men and she will upset the order of things. “Ordinary people, little people interest me a lot. And I like to see what they are capable of. You have to be careful of the instinct to revolt, it does not always come from great projects and great men or great women. It is the moment, historically when we no longer even have enough to eat that we are brought to the point where we no longer even have enough to eat and brought to the point where, eventually, we put our lives in the balance. It is true that until then, the submission of peasants for centuries comes from the fact that we can survive. The moment we cross that barrier and, to survive, we have to eat carrion or add wood sweat or chalk to flour, and therefore be sick and therefore die anyway. Something arises, but something that does not come from the established order. The established order always has an interest in it persisting.”

A Morvan childhood

Her latest story is a novel of the land, rural and rooted. Which Sandrine Colette readily admits: “It’s a long continuity. I was lulled by the countryside because, as a baby, I was taken to the Morvan during the holidays. It was my great-grandmother’s land and I returned there. This woman opened the hunting season until she was 92 and went shopping on her moped in the village until she was 94, not looking when she left the path onto the road! I have kept this love of the land and the stories we were told, and I try to anchor my novels in this way.”

Originally a book about cold

Originally, with this book, the writer wanted to evoke the cold, the great devastating winters that ravaged France, and caused thousands of deaths. Why write about the cold in the midst of global warming? For Sandrine Colette, it is “precisely because global warming has meant that in recent years, in my area and obviously much more widely than in the Morvan, there have been late frosts. It seems paradoxical, but in fact it is not. These late frosts meant that there was no fruit on the fruit trees. And I thought at that moment, about the great winters and everything that a famine could imply in another era.”

The rest is to be listened to…