As often, Maxime Chattam had sweet words for Faustine Bollaert and their children. But in his latest book, the writer admits… lying to Peter and Abbie, for their own good.
For Faustine Bollaert as for Maxime Chattam, the family is the most important thing. Happy parents of Abbie and Peter, the host and the writer are also more in love than ever. On November 3, it was with great joy that the presenter of It starts today rushed to the bookstore to discover her husband’s latest novel on the shelves, The Constancy of the Predator. As often in his books, the author slipped a little thought for his wife and their children at the end of his manuscript. “Sometimes my wife reads a chapter that I just wrote, and she stares at me in silence for a few seconds. I know she wonders what is going on in my head to have such ideas”first wrote Maxime Chattam in the acknowledgments of his book.
In the continuation of his thanks, Maxime Chattam made rare and amusing confidences about his two children … who do not know much about his job. “They think I just write ‘scary books.’ confided the writer. May they still give me hugs when I come down from the office, when I look a little out of place.” Aware of lying by omission to Peter and Abbie, the husband of Faustine Bollaert then addressed the people who read his books to ask for their precious help: “Dear readers, please don’t ruin everything by telling them the truth, thank you”.
Maxime Chattam: “I had to meet Faustine for that”
“Abbie and Peter, I love you. You give meaning to life. It’s a big responsibility. And rest assured, you don’t have to do anything to take it on. Just be you. The rest is up to you. the role of parents, concluded the writer, a real father hen. And this is not the first time that Maxime Chattam has dedicated one of his works to his wife. “To my wife, Faustine, who allowed me to distinguish between illusion and happiness”he wrote in particular in The Illusionin 2020. He then told the meaning of this far from trivial sentence: “Sometimes in life, we are lucky enough to meet people who will show us that we were thinking of something and we were content with what we had…”
“When I wrote this dedication, I said to myself: ‘There is an interpretation’, he remembered on the set of C to you, very amused. She looked at me and she said, ‘I hope I understood that correctly’. For a long time, like many men, I believed in love or at least in the illusion of what happiness was. At one point, I understood that building together was not that, but it was something else. I had to meet Faustine for that.” On September 1, Maxime Chattam and Faustine Bollaert celebrated the tenth anniversary of their marriage at the same time as the return of their children. Since 2010 and their meeting in a program she presented on European 1they never leave each other.