“Madelaine before dawn”, by Sandrine Collette, JC Lattès, 250 p., 20.90 euros, digital 10 euros.
Some abandoned children have such tough skin that they survive, grow stronger, and end up outshining others. Madeleine before dawn is one of them. Sandrine Collette initially abandoned this novel. She had written a first almost complete version when another idea made her leave everything to write We were wolves (JC Lattès, 2022).
At the end of 2022, after the success of this story about a man and his unwanted child, the novelist asks himself: what next? Should he return to his archived manuscript? He reads it again. There is something. The wild and brave girl at the centre of the book still speaks to him. The cold, the famines too. The spark had come one spring marked by late frosts, a few years earlier. “In my village of Morvan, That year we didn’t have fruitremember. No cherry. Rotten apples. Then I did some research on the great cold of the 18th century.my century. Like in 1709, when winter killed thousands of people. It was yesterday on the scale of humanity and it could happen again tomorrow. » She stuck to her topic.
In retrospect, however, the flaws of this manuscript, entitled “The Great Winter,” are obvious to him. The first part, dense, is a bit disorganized. The second lacks density. “Diluted”judge. Sandrine Collette hesitates. She is thinking of a completely new project. Her editor at JC Lattès, Constance Trapenard, encouraged her to return to her initial text. But will it be sufficiently different from the previous one, which also combined a very tough character and complex family relationships? “I was afraid to do it again We were wolves »confess.
A decisive reversal
So she starts over from “Great Winter,” but changes everything. For her second novel, A wind of ashes (Denoël, 2014), had already torn up a first version, transformed the framework of the story and rewrote 80% of the text. This time, he throws out the second part and reconstructs the rest. The order of the sequences is altered. New characters appear, complicating the story. He also adds a decisive change after 130 pages. Instead of the original omniscient narrator, it is Bran, the closest companion of his protagonist, Madelaine, who says “I”. “I loved writing in the first person We were wolves, the writer explains. It puts you really inside the speaker…”
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