Its blond square shines in the flamboyant orange of the chandelier that can be seen behind the half-open door.
She walks, hesitantly, barefoot on the cold cobblestones of the courtyard plunged into the night.
The gate opens with a metallic creak.
Karine Lacombe is in pajamas.
She had forgotten our appointment made one evening, during a crazy week as she has not counted them since the start of the pandemic.
Erected as a star doctor in the health crisis by the televisions and radios that tear up her analyzes, the head of the infectious disease department of the Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris (12th century) was finally going to be able to take some time for herself.
Reread Le Clézio, Gary or Camus.
Why not even write a few verses as she usually does before going to sleep to gain strength and face this third wave that is overwhelming the hospital.
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No matter, here she is climbing up the stairs four at a time to put Mila, her 8-year-old daughter, to bed, inviting us to wait for her, no frills.
From the living room lined with books that stretches out into the hallway to the garden of her house in Fontenay-sous-Bois (Val-de-Marne), we can hear the mother happily pampering her youngest child.
She comes back downstairs a few minutes later, jeans and tunic hastily put on, as fresh and smiling as a spring morning.
It is 9:30 p.m., it's herbal tea time for the one you wouldn't imagine keeping without a shot of an energy drink and a tube of anti-fatigue tablets.
And yet, no need.
Karine Lacombe is fueled by the will to do well.
To lead everything simultaneously, without ever abandoning anything.
Without compromise.
Neither for her work, nor for her tribe of three children born to three different dads, nor even for her neighbors whom she has made friends.
The epicurean knew how to create a decompression bubble
The quinqua sails in a gang.
In the winding passage where she settled in 2012, she found a beautiful one.
A village in itself that smells of lilac and from which bursts of laughter from the first fine days.
“A family” nestled in the suburban fabric of the edge of the Bois de Vincennes.
Yet she had sworn to herself never to leave the tumult of Paris which had attracted her younger.
In Fontenay, this daughter of a worker and a teacher, born in the mountain pastures of Savoy, has found her base.
A serene and joyful bubble, filled - when sanitary conditions permit - with aperitifs and dinners, jazz concerts and shows at the nearby Halle Roublot.
An airlock where the epicurean resource before going to face the extended days and the weeks that merge in the Covid storm.
At the head of a team of 100 people
Before the pandemic, this former Médecins du Monde took her Hippocratic Oath to vulnerable populations affected by HIV or hepatitis C in Africa and Asia.
She ran to medical congresses every week to carry out her immunotherapy research projects across Europe.
All this in addition to his duties at the hospital.
Six years in Bordeaux, before Saint-Antoine since 2007 in the service of infectious diseases.
Less than a year before the virus first bursts, she was the first woman to take the lead.
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We catch our breath, Karine Lacombe's schedule makes you dizzy.
The infectious disease specialist leads a team of 100 people, consults in the mornings, carries out briefs with his staff, swallows sandwiches in front of his emails and devotes his afternoons to research and teaching at the Pierre-et- medical school. Marie Curie.
The few moments of respite are now interspersed with an interview that she is reluctant to refuse, driven by the desire to continue her educational decryption on the virus and its management.
One knee bent under her leg, she adds as if to justify herself: "And then also, as an expert woman, for once we are given the floor I will not let her."
Some, lurking behind social networks, would have liked to silence her with virulent and often sexist attacks.
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You can hardly count her hours, she stopped doing it.
More than 80 per week "roughly", sweeps the marathon runner in a white coat without imagining a complaint.
“She never says she can't take it anymore but she is able to tell that she is tired.
She's a human anyway, she manages to keep her balance and find time for the three of us.
But we don't hesitate to bring her back to earth when she does too much, ”proudly describes her eldest daughter, Ysatis, 23, who is following in her mother's footsteps in her fifth year of medicine.
A drawn logbook sketches his daily life
Fiamma Luzzati confirms the daily “frantic race”.
The cartoonist followed Karine Lacombe to the hospital during the first wave of the epidemic and with her published the drawn up diary “the Doctor: an infectious disease specialist in the time of the corona”, published in November.
We see her leaving every morning on her bike to the bedside of her patients, keeping her service vessel afloat, wondering about this virus that has knocked the world out, reassuring her neighbors, blowing out her 50 candles on a cake that has been taken out. by surprise by his team between two consultations, finding his children around chatty meals.
“Karine is a self-confident, very organized and efficient person, which allows her to swallow a huge workload and take care of her family and social life.
We have the impression that we can rely on her, she is always reassuring and generous.
She is appreciated by her team and loved by her friends and neighbors, which is also what carries her, ”wraps the designer with her Sicilian accent, still impressed by her subject.
The author Fiamma Luzzati recounts the first wave of the epidemic through the eyes of Karine Lacombe in "the Doctor: an infectious disease specialist in the time of the corona", a comic published in November.
/ Fiamma Luzzati
Last spring, at the height of the crisis, his solidarity clique from Fontenay put on aprons, brandished saucepans and gathered volunteers beyond the neighborhood.
Each week, a family would prepare a meal for their friend's proven team before delivering it to Saint-Antoine.
Very supportive neighbors and friends
“This is really what makes the identity of the passage, there is a lot of solidarity and mutual aid between us.
Our gardens communicate, we almost have to get along and with Karine it was easy.
She is hyperactive who does a thousand things at once but who knows how to be there for her friends even if it's been speed these last months.
Her secret is that she doesn't get much sleep!
», Confides his neighbor, Priscilla.
Herself a doctor at the municipal health center of Fontenay-sous-Bois, she was able to benefit from the advice of her neighbor, yet overwhelmed by the influx of patients in intensive care.
Karine Lacombe's priesthood does not stop under the porch of Saint-Antoine hospital.
The infectious disease specialist trained the doctors of Fontenay by videoconference in the management of contaminations.
She even finds time to advise her mayor
The mayor of the city, Jean-Philippe Gautrais (FG), was also able to take advice from the expert, met a few years ago during the famous "Fête du Passage", a banquet that the neighbors organize at the announcement of the summer.
“We were in regular contact, she is a very pedagogue, we need that too and that made things easier.
She participated in a video exchange with the inhabitants, also helped me to form an opinion and to think about solutions for the health protocol in schools, deconfinement or vaccination.
She always manages to find the time to support my decisions, it may seem paradoxical in view of her responsibilities, but that's what makes the charm of the city to which she is very attached.
"
Like last year, the new confinement could well postpone the traditional weekend in the countryside that the twenty neighbors offer themselves at Pentecost.
Karine Lacombe will probably have to wait until summer to find the mountains of her childhood, where she takes her children to storm the glaciers, to this clear horizon of which she does not seem to measure how much she deserves.