Le Figaro: "Je ne pouvait plus mentir" (I could no longer lie): Thibault de Montaigu, by the grace of his father" (in French)

The subject of Thibault de Montaigu's latest book was an obvious one: in-depth research into his paternal lineage. BERTRAND GUAY / AFP

" When I receive the Prix Interallié, I think of the dark hallway with the green carpet on the second floor of my grandfather Claude Gallimard's country house in Pressagny. I spent my life there as a teenager, at a time when I felt very bad about myself. The entire "Folio" collection from the 1970s was there, from the very beginning. Books by Michel Déon, Félicien Marceau and Antoine Blondin all won the Interallié and fed my imagination. These people are like my original family. And receiving this prize is like becoming part of that family. It's very moving for me. Thibault de Montaigu pauses and adds: " Today, my thoughts are with my father, but also with Claude (Claude Gallimard), Simone (Gallimard, his mother), Gaston Gallimard (his great-grandfather). I finally feel part of this family. I've become a writer.

Yesterday afternoon, Thibault de Montaigu left a lunch at Lasserre's for the members of the Prix Interallié jury, chaired by Jean-Marie Rouart. He made no secret of his excitement at receiving the award for his latest novel, Cœur, published by Albin Michel.

And he implicitly acknowledged that, through his quest for his father, Emmanuel Tassin de Montaigu, for whom he wrote this book, this magnificent and tender family investigation, he also intended to be recognized by his maternal family... this maternal family, where, on Friday evenings, in the family country house, we watched " Apostrophes " " like mass ". " My parents were a bit of divas, they were very absent. I saw writers as adored beings. At a very young age, something happened in my psyche, in my vocation as a writer. "

A strange admission. It's true, from the outset, we've been waiting for this well-born young man, who went to the best schools in the upper class - Henri IV, Sciences Po - this journalist (who started out at Libé, then went on to work for Paris Match and L'Officiel, among others) who, at the age of 23, wanted to enter the literary scene with his first novel Les anges brûlent (Fayard). And he remembers as if it were yesterday Michel Polac's remark to him, convinced that he bore Gallimard's "sacred" name: " Thibault de Montaigu, what a ridiculous pseudonym !

He still seems to feel the sting of this jab as an obligation "to be even more up to scratch". He continues: "My mother was angry with her brothers and sisters, and for a long time I had the impression of being excluded from a destiny that awaited me. All my life, I've tried to live up to the Gallimard standards. It's always been with me.

In the small milieu of Parisian literary circles, it was thought that, sooner or later, Thibault de Montaigu would tackle his family history. On his mother's side, that is. After six novels, a successful literary career, and a book, La Grâce (Plon), published in 2020, which took him into the big leagues, it was time. Didn't he write, at the turn of a sentence, in Cœur: "I was immediately classified like Gallimard, my maternal family, not because of any literary aptitude but rather because of vigorous thighs and hair implantation."

But Montaigu, marked by his father's departure from the family home when he was a little boy, didn't go where he was expected. He let himself be carried to other shores. After his previous novels had evoked the destinies of shattered personalities, drawn by dark stars (alcohol, drugs, excesses of all kinds - " lost boys, anti-heroes who are often looking for something ", notes his editor Louise Danou, who has known him since the beginning), the subject of his latest book was obvious: an in-depth research into his paternal filiation.

Côté Montaigu, then. An investigation " imposed by circumstances " as " the last wish " of an octogenarian father who, after having been a flamboyant man, " a figure of the Trente Glorieuses, with a physique à la Maurice Ronet " whom little Thibault would have liked so much to resemble, ended his life alone, blind and ruined. But with dreams of greatness still in his head. He gave his son a mission: to investigate his great-grandfather, Louis, who died during a cavalry charge - the last in French history - in 1914.

At first, the writer, busy with other projects, was reluctant. But then he got round to it, and was able to reconnect with his long-absent father. In the end, he realizes that it's not he who's giving his father a gift, but the other way around, and that by researching his grandfather, he's prolonging his father's life, like a modern-day Scheherazade.

A deeply moving and heartfelt novel, " a love letter to his father and children ", which questions the weight of family history. As his editor points out, the underlying theme is " the questions of guilt and redemption that have always haunted Thibault ", as he constantly refers to Saint Augustine's Confessions, " a founding text " for him.

Already in La Grâce, which won the Prix de Flore in 2020, the forty-something, who had set out in the footsteps of an uncle, Christian, who had decided at 37 to become a Franciscan friar after leading a dissolute life, had surreptitiously switched to "I". In his youth, he had also experienced excess, drugs, alcohol and the life of a zombie, and had written this book when he had fallen into a deep depression. That he could no longer find meaning in his existence. Until one night, in the chapel of a monastery, this atheist was touched by grace. At 37, just like his uncle.

A novel he had written while living in Argentina (his wife is from that country, and his two children are Argentinian), in the pampas, " three or four hours from Buenos Aires, and by hand, lit by a candle ", following a power failure. " I realized then that I could no longer lie. It was as if my soul appeared on paper. " And that's how Thibault de Montaigu finally came out of his gangue. By letting his soul shine through, and in the name of his family. True to Oscar Wilde's words: " Children begin by loving their parents ; when they grow up, they judge them ; sometimes, they forgive them. "

Albin Michel cover

"Coeur" by Thibault de Montaigu, Albin Michel, 336 p., €21.90.

Read the article on www.lefigaro.fr

By Anne Fulda

Published November 13, 2024