All the capital lives of Dominique Bona | EUROtoday
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“II by no means believed within the border between the actual and the imaginary”, reveals Dominique Bona at the beginning of the preface to his Destiny of women. Adding: “Never believed, therefore, in the radical separation supposed to oppose fiction to non-fiction. »
The girls that she recounts on this assortment bringing collectively the books that made her the good biographer that we all know, distinguished by the Goncourt of biography or the Biography prize of the French Academy, however existed: Berthe Morisot, the Heredia and Rouart sisters, Colette, and even the good love of Paul Valéry, Jeanne Voilier, who dedicated the sacrilege of placing up for public sale the thousand missives he despatched to her whereas transfixed, all burning.
Can we permit ourselves, subsequently, to recount them, these heroines whose flesh actually palpitated, even when nothing palpable stays, with the assistance of the fertile crutch of an creativeness of author? No, Dominique Bona refuses, who assures that he has by no means invented something in his biographies. Neither a date, nor a dialogue, nor even an evening of affection, “although I was tempted”.
So how does she do it? She goes via the archives and correspondence, is cautious to not challenge the psychological classes of her time onto these girls who had been from one other period, and believes, above all, within the forces of narrative which alone has the facility to resurrect the previous. And so it’s that the one who can be the demanding, however benevolent, president of the jury for the Biography of Point has given them again to us in his books as in themselves, the good artists who make up his “imaginary family”.
In love, indomitable, free
What pleasure now we have in rediscovering, with Black Eyesthe Heredia sisters, three brown comets imposing themselves within the ideally suited but additionally very carnal sky of the Belle Époque! Marie, above all, muse and poet, queen of “canaquademia”, whom Dominique Bona first discovers bare, at an outdated e book seller, in a photograph taken by Pierre Louÿs. All this, in truth, can’t be invented.
Joy of additionally diving again into the world of Colette from her roommate days in August 1914, together with her three pals Annie de Pène, novelist and journalist, like her, Marguerite Moreno, elegant actress, and Musidora, the youngest, future “vampire” within the cinema (Colette and hers). Four very free women in a Paris given over to girls.
Berthe Morisot (The Secret of the Woman in Black), the Rouart sisters, muses of impressionism (Two Sisters), and Jeanne Voilier (I’m loopy about you) are additionally there: in love, indomitable, free. Their lives are novels. Great classes, too.
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
“Fate of women”by Dominique Bona (Books, 1,312 p., €32).
https://www.lepoint.fr/livres/toutes-les-vies-majuscules-de-dominique-bona-26-11-2024-2576346_37.php