In her first novel, Ultramarins (1), the writer Mariette Navarro portrays a cargo commander, daughter of a captain, for whom there was never any question of having a life on land. A professional who "belongs to the water, as others have the pride of distant origins," she writes. In this short and beautiful fictional text, she shows through this female character what it takes rigor, precision and attention to take on this role. But also what the immensity of the water, the sea, the ocean can offer freedom, horizon and even escape. Taking up Aristotle's quote, she makes it her own: "There are the living, the dead, and the sailors." Madame Figaro wanted to share the destiny of women exercising their profession underwater, below the level of the waterline, "under the diopter", according to the expression of one of them, the first woman commander aboard a submarine of the French navy.
There are the living, the dead, and the sailors
Mariette Navarro
What are they looking for? Anchoring or leaving? Mission or duty? Beauty or refuge? Did they spend their lives there or did they one day go in search of water resources? We do not find ourselves by chance in duet with such an element. All of them have a special relationship with the sea. First testimony of our series dedicated to these women in immersion: that of the explorer Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout.
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The training boat
At the age of 6, in Champagne, on a Sunday, she discovered a documentary on Commander Cousteau. "I was worried because I didn't see female divers on the Calypso." At the age of 12, the show Thalassa presents a school boat on which children embark and learn on the water. "My parents were adamantly against it, but they let me apply thinking I had little chance!" At the age of 13, she spent six months on this ship between France, England, the Canary Islands and Morocco. "I understood that it was not a fantasy. I didn't know how I was going to dedicate my life to it, but I was sure of it: it was at sea that I was good."
In the fall of 2019, Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout and her husband created La Capsule, a low-tech marine habitat, supported by Rolex's Perpetual Planet initiative, which allows you to spend three days and three nights underwater. Frank Gazzola
Underwater life
In 2007, at the age of 30, she left with her husband. Under The Pole is a 47-day expedition on the ice floe, this world of ice every year more endangered, of which they report an underwater testimony in pictures. Their submerged "ice cathedrals" go around the world. Two years in Greenland, the acquisition of a boat and two children later, they make this observation: time is lacking during scuba diving (three hours maximum). In autumn 2019, they created the Capsule, a low-tech marine habitat, supported by Rolex's Perpetual Planet initiative, which allows you to spend three days and three nights underwater. Emmanuelle sleeps, works there, eats there. The light that filters every morning, the same turtle visiting, the trumpet fish she recognizes and to whom she gives jazzmen surnames... "It's like a city that is being set up, whose functioning we understand, as if the Capsule were our home and the reef, our garden. I learned more about underwater life in three days than in fifteen years."
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Water, tomorrow
"The difficulty is that most people don't have the chance to dive, and not aware that their action on land has an impact underwater." At 40, she understands that her children will not see a coral reef. "Nature is still quite resilient: some species that we did not see there are found in areas of northern Norway, others migrate to the bottom ... The notion of shelter, of refuge is revealed. The question is how we humans are going to give this nature a deadline to let it adapt..."
(1) Published in August 2021 by Éditions Quidam.