Book. At first, a collection. Imagined by two editors, Stéphanie Kalfon and Amélie Cordonnier, “Retour chez soi” invites writers to return to a place they abandoned for a long time and that they would find for a night and a day. Mazarine Pingeot returned to 11 Branly Pierin the 7th arrondissement of Paris, a dependency of the Elysée where François Mitterrand’s daughter settled with her mother, Anne, after her father’s election in 1981, when she was between 9 and 16 years old.
Instead of Gordes (Vaucluse), where her parents had a house, Auvergne, where her mother was from, Landes or Nièvre, the philosophy professor and novelist chose “the soul”TO “transitional accommodation where no one passed by”at the same time “decoration” AND “grave” of a hidden and secret adolescence. Location of your “disappearance” (in the eyes of the world), is also that of “meeting”often happy, because in this big apartment, whose wallpaper she hates, the three of them finally live, “play as if nothing happened”.
His father has been dead for thirty years. “Mazarine” turns 50 years old. For this dangerous literary project, he obtained authorization from the Elysée; The occupant of the apartment agreed to leave him the keys. “I’m afraid to go back”he said immediately. He arrived there one day in February, immediately found “the pale light of childhood”. The old beige rug no longer exists, his father’s Le Corbusier armchair has disappeared. He sees himself in the hallway, touching the rubber, he still smells the toast in the renovated kitchen, which is losing its flavor. “old-fashioned charm”. it’s all there “chicpier, newer”points out. The memory, painfully, awakens. “But for what? »asks Mazarine Pingeot.
“Opening childhood”
To make this damn address “similar to others”maybe. For “open childhood” : When facing it, free yourself from its influence. For “bring into existence that which has been deprived of all vision”. When, at the end of the experience, the author closes the apartment door, she realizes that she had never left. “Not everyone is willing to start saying goodbye again when they were missed the first time. Now I can leave the premises without running away from him. » So : “Do I exist now?” »
around this “ghost house” Revisited, there are games of mirrors between reality and literature, public history and private destiny, a difficulty in accepting that this history, our own, is also a little ours. “This apartment exists in books written by others”says those who fear stare, while feeding them: by definition, they write to be read. “Being a prisoner of a public image and constantly fighting against it by trusting it was a family affair”admits.
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