Appropriating the memories that his mother bequeathed to him, dusting off a story “which has become embedded and has taken root”, Rafaële Germain sensitively revisits these Fortresses and other refuges family. Daughter of Francine Chaloult and Georges-Hébert Germain, she recounts “the images that grew there [en elle] since'[elle est] small, in the shadow of the stories that[e sa mère] [lui] told”. In a felt, poetic and assumed writing, the author invests her favorite theme with a living force. Opening the doors of the family home which never slept, where “absolutely no one ever sang except in French”, Germain recounts his childhood, that of this little Black-Suie who never smiled, his parents’ rage to live until his mother’s last moments, “a ravaged fortress […] a deluge in the middle of the desert” who had refused until the very end to accept this fatality that is Alzheimer’s. A moving and profoundly human journey.
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