Quebec has just lost a loyal reader. My mother, alas, took her last breath on November 3, at noon, at the age of 77. Daughter of a small village notable – my adored grandfather – she held a teaching certificate C and worked her life as a secretary in the CHSLD where she died. She was a modest woman, who liked, in order, her family, literature, cinema and songs in French. I can’t remember a single day when she didn’t read.
In My mother’s book (1954), a masterpiece by Albert Cohen that I reread with emotion these days, the great Swiss writer of Jewish origin evokes with overwhelming intensity the memory of his dear deceased. “To mourn your mother,” he writes, “is to mourn your childhood. Man wants his childhood, wants her back, and if he loves his mother more as he gets older, it is because his mother is his childhood. I was a child, I am no longer and I cannot believe it. “
Like him, with the death of my mother, I return to my childhood, to my youth, and I find there the living source of my visceral attachment to literature. My mother, like the one in the ritornello, always sang, but she read, above all, because, for her, reading was a matter of course, part of her life, like cooking.
My children’s literature, it is she, who reads me the tales of Perrault, the Grimm’s and Andersen; it is she who enjoys reading to us, to my brother and to me, The woes of Sophie, of the Countess of Ségur; it is she, above all, when I have become a teenage reader, who speaks to me with enthusiasm about her incessant readings.
My mom never told me that I had to read, that it was important for academic success and everything else that usually goes with motivational speech related to this activity. She didn’t need to do it; I only had to watch her act to understand that one could not live well without reading. It is not high-sounding inducements that make you want to read; this is the example.
My mother read everything, with a predilection for realistic French authors. She did not disdain the sentimentalist novels of an author like Guy des Cars, which her own mother lent her, she loved the saga. The Jalna (1927-1960), by the Canadian Mazo de la Roche, she had been captivated by her reading of We were the Mulvaney (1998), by the disturbing Joyce Carol Oates, she had read with surprising interest The history of Molson (L’Homme, 2001), written by a descendant of the family and it prized the elegant philosophical prose of André Comte-Sponville. His favorites, however, were unquestionably Pagnol and Maupassant.
In the diary that she bequeathed to me, and that I have been discovering for three weeks with tears in my eyes, but with immense gratitude, my mother addresses Pagnol directly – “Marcel”, she wrote in a friendly manner – to tell him that she can’t wait to shake his hand and say thank you for creating “such beautiful things, so delicate, so full of tenderness”.
She wrote this entry in 1996, when she had just reviewed for the ninth time the Marseille trilogy. “I saw these great actors come back to life on my television,” she notes, excited. It’s like they’re still alive and playing for me. I was Fanny, Marius, Caesar and even Panisse. “
As a teenager, I resisted her invitations to watch Pagnol’s films with her. Fortunately, later I said yes and I will forever remember her deep and sweet emotion, and mine, in front of The baker’s wife. My mother’s precious passion, which she passed on to me without ceremony, for subtle literature and cinema, without excluding farce since she also loved Louis de Funès’ films.
My mother had a sense of mercy. This clemency – the first name of her mother and her granddaughter – certainly came to her, in part, from her Christian faith. It also came to him, I am convinced, from his reading of Maupassant’s novels and short stories. My Catholic mother, brought up by a rather rigorous father in matters of morals, loved the magnificent prostitutes of the Norman writer, his troubled characters, condemned by fate to the use of practical sense rather than respect for principles; she loved the story of Hautot father and son, in which the former, dying, entrusts his mistress to his son, who falls under the spell. My mother knew how to live because she was a reader.
“Sons of mothers who are still living, do not forget that your mothers are mortal,” wrote Albert Cohen. I will not have written in vain, if one of you, after having read my death song, is gentler with his mother one evening, because of me and my mother. Don’t worry, mom: if God exists, he sure loves reading.