Would swimming, thinking, dreaming be different stages of one and the same movement? This is what the French writer Chantal Thomas seems to believe, who has just been received at the French Academy in the chair of Jean d’Ormesson – another great swimmer before the Eternal.
It is with a swim diary which smells of foam and sand which it plunges in the wake of its Memories of low tide (Seuil, 2017), a story in which she painted an inspired portrait of her mother as an intrepid and tireless swimmer.
For the novelist Farewell to the Queen (Seuil, Prix Femina 2002), specialist in 18th century literaturee, which was a way of fighting against confinement quickly becomes a form of breathing. This is how from the beginning of June 2021, the date of her first sea bath of the year, until August 29, installed in Nice (the “country of summer”), the 77-year-old writer bathes almost every day in open waters in the Mediterranean, writing down what she sees, what she reads and what she feels.
“In the summer, in Nice, I wake up three times, once when I open my eyes (the songs of birds at dawn have already cracked the enclosure of my sleep), a second time with the coffee, a third, the most invigorating, the real awakening: when I plunge my head into water. »
Swimmers and sea lovers know it: you never swim twice in the same waters. For Chantal Thomas, “every morning contains an opportunity to start and a chance for adventure, emotional, intellectual – the search for a certain quality of vibrations”.
Passionate swimmer and avid reader, she was accompanied that summer by the Log of Kafka, of Fenua by Patrick Deville (“irresistible invitation to leave”), hero and swimmers of Charles Sprawson, or even of Sea bathsin which Paul Morand lists the places and countries where he swam.
Swimming is also remembering — if we had forgotten — that we have a body. In Nice, opposite the famous Negresco hotel, a few strokes from the Corsaire beach, in front of the Castle hill, swimming in the sea is for Chantal Thomas the opportunity to explore all the degrees of sensation. “Amazingly soft water. Velvet effect on the skin. A texture experienced in the form of a caress”, she writes, attentive to “this voluptuousness of wholeness, of abandonment to an immensity which takes care of you and your resources of pleasure”.
And just like the movements of the swimmer, the writing is “the kick of the heel which operates the seesaw from death to life. It is the unique and mysterious force of rescue, of salvation”.
“The sea has no age, she wrote on Sunday July 25, 2021. It does not proceed, like the mountains, by datable successive strata. Erasure is its principle. Each wave cancels the previous one. Being propelled into timelessness is part of the joy of swimming. And since the sea has no age, neither does the swimmer. It’s the perfect makeover.
A seagull lands in gliding flight in front of the writer to catch a fish? The verdict is in: “Swimming brings birds together. »