When writers celebrate their mother

They offered their finest words to readers around the world. Those in which man's feelings transpire. Among them, love for a mother. A theme that occupies an important place in the pen of writers. This is because literature is the ideal place to celebrate the person to whom one owes one's life. Anthology of statements to be read carefully.

To discover

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• Proust, "she takes my life with her"

"I only love one person in this world, and that's Mom." A few days after the death of his mother, on September 26, 1905, it is with these words that Marcel Proust ends his letter to Louis d'Albuféra, his friend. A day later, he wrote to Anna de Noailles: "She takes my life with her, as Papa had taken hers." Proust then began writing La Recherche, reclusive for the day at home, and revived Jeanne Weil through certain character traits of her characters. This is the case with Albertine who, in the scene of Combray's kiss, reminds the narrator of the maternal kiss.

• Hugo, "the unexplorable and sweet heart"

We are the flesh of her flesh, those over whom she watches from evening to morning as a child, and for whom she will worry until the end of her days. So it is difficult to see the bird leaving its nest. In La légende des siècles (1859), a collection of poems intended to depict the history and evolution of humanity, Victor Hugo wrote: "A mother is the unexplorable and sweet heart, white on the sacred side, black on the jealous side."

See alsoThese words invented by the winners of the Prix Goncourt

• Cohen, "his mother is his childhood"

"To mourn your mother is to mourn your childhood." The tone is set. In Le livre de ma mère (1954), Albert Cohen - who was consecrated in 1968 with Belle du seigneur - recounts the episode of his life in which his parents emigrated to Marseille and founded a business there. A period during which his mother's courage and kindness increased tenfold. The author pays tribute to him by writing: "Man wants his childhood, wants it back, and if he loves his mother more as he gets older, it is because his mother is his childhood. I was a child, I'm not a child anymore and I can't believe it."

• Gary, "With motherly love, life makes you a promise it never keeps"

In The Promise of Dawn (1960), Romain Gary recounts his childhood and youth with his mother, a Russian immigrant whose only wealth was the love she received from having a son. Devoted, her disappearance gives the narrator a wound that he knows is twofold: he will never meet such love again and must marry the glorious destiny she has predicted for him. He writes: "With motherly love, life makes you, at dawn, a promise that it never keeps. [...] I am not saying that mothers should be prevented from loving their young. I'm just saying that it's better for mothers to still have someone else to love. If my mother had had a lover, I would not have spent my life dying of thirst at every fountain. Unfortunately for me, I know myself as real diamonds."