"It's the straw that broke the camel's back,"
said Julie Berthollet.
The Franco-Swiss violinist, originally from Annecy (Haute-Savoie) and Parisian for five years, told the Swiss press that she was considering leaving the capital, after being the victim of a double attack the same morning, towards the boulevard Rochechouart (9th), in the north of Paris.
A few minutes after having run into a passerby who had tried to steal her phone, the musician met at the entrance to a metro station on line 4 an individual armed with a knife who ripped off her bracelet. and two necklaces.
Hurt and shocked by the attack, the violinist filed a complaint.
“A man passed me and looked at me with an evil look, full of hatred. He said to me: “You, with your ornaments!”
, Julie Berthollet told the Swiss magazine
L'Illustré
last week .
According to the musician, one of the two bracelets, in gold, had a particularly sentimental value for her.
"I received it from my mother when I was born
," she said.
"I have lost faith in humanity,"
added the violinist, flabbergasted by the most total indifference of passers-by, many of whom attended the scene
.
“Users were going up and down.
They even moved aside leaving him enough space to attack me.
(…) It's total indifference
, ”she recalls.
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Ambient violence
Julie Berthollet is now thinking of settling in Switzerland, perhaps in Lavaux.
In any case, far, very far from Paris:
“I no longer want to live in a place where individualism is omnipresent.
I have absolutely no shoulders to support all this ambient violence
.
The violinist's sister, cellist Camille Berthollet, with whom she won the television music competition "Prodiges" in 2014, is also planning to leave the capital to return to Annecy.
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More broadly, Julie Berthollet insisted on underlining the hostility that the urban space of the capital presents to a woman.
“With my sister, we have avoidance strategies
, she testified for
L’Illustré
.
We are careful at night.
We avoid certain neighborhoods, we lower our gaze to the street.
Loose tracksuits are often worn.
In principle, we never hold our phone visibly in our hands.
We walk where there are people.
We never go home alone in the evening, if we have had a little to drink.”
The violinist had already had her phone stolen.
In 2020, in the wake of the #MeeToo movement and the freedom of speech for women victims of sexual violence, the two Berthollet sisters had testified to the frequency of harassment in the world of classical music.
“If we dress short there will be a remark, if we dress long there will also be a remark”
, they declared for Loopsider in February 2020.
“It is something else in Switzerland.
Here, people are polite, we don't ignore the other”
, summed up Julie Berthollet for
L'Illustré
.
