In Si tu savais, c'est merveilleux, Marie-Christine Barrault unfolds, with dazzling elegance and going, the memories of her loved ones who have now disappeared: her mother, her father, her father-in-law, her uncle, Jean-Louis Barrault, her husbands, Daniel Toscan du Plantier and Roger Vadim... A book delivering the portrait of an actress and an extraordinary woman, who, at 79, still feels "like a schoolgirl", eager to learn and do.
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In video, Bardot, with Julia de Nunez, Yvan Attal, the trailer
Madame Figaro. – What was the starting point of this book?
Marie-Christine Barrault. – The encounters I had with death, including on stage, with A Death in the Family, where my character dies in a nursing home, and Voyage à Zurich – which I will replay this summer in Avignon – about a woman going to be euthanized. In both cases, I die, and I could not help but wonder about this death that has accompanied me for a long time. Moving into old age, I realize that, unlike many people who are in denial of death, I have internalized the idea. Even if I am very dynamic and full of projects, she stands by my side, and every time in a role, a text, a reading, there is something that makes me approach her mystery – I think, for example, of Marguerite Yourcenar's Open Eyes – I rush. With this book, I wanted to evoke death to better talk about life.
Si tu savais, c'est merveilleux, by Marie-Christine Barrault, Éditions Stock, 250 p., €18.50. Photo S.P.
This is the whole tone of a text where you affirm that "death gave birth to you"...
For the section "I wouldn't have gotten here if..." of the World, I spontaneously thought of "if I had not lost my father". I then became aware of the missing who accompanied me. The wound of my father's death gave birth to me. If the phrase "The living close the eyes of the dead and the dead open the eyes of the living" appears on the cover of the book, it is because I think that the dead help us to live if we ask them to. It is not easy, but it is possible, otherwise we are condemned to perpetual regret. Many women have told me that they have lost taste for everything after the disappearance of their partner. When Roger Vadim left, I resolved to behave as I would have done if he had still been by my side and I had wanted to please him. It gave me a lot of strength. In truth, to be dead when one is still alive is a sin for me.
Marie-Christine Barrault's private collection
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez "The most beautiful love story! Passion and loyalty surviving all obstacles." A dog at my table, by Claudie Hunzinger "A masterpiece about old age, nature... and the heroine's husband. I had the chance to do the audio version." A Life Turned Upside Down, by Etty Hillesum "The diary of a woman who had, until her death in Auschwitz, kept joy and faith in humanity." Les Chansons et les Heures, by Marie Noël "A poet of extraordinary virulence... Holy perhaps, but never submissive!"
The book is structured around everyone who has mattered to you. What did they bring you?
My father taught me the lack, and my whole journey has been to try to close this wound. By disappearing, my father-in-law gave me the immense gift of curing me forever of all guilt. My first love, Daniel Toscan du Plantier, taught me fidelity. Roger Vadim is the one whose departure affected me the most. He is the man who has brought me the most, and, by his death, he is also the one who has taken me the most. He had this beautiful sentence: "You see, I leave you with 'vacation' homework..." An invitation to live to which I fully responded.
