EShe has always done as she pleases, taking the opposite path to her mother, Nathalie Sarraute, the author of Tropismes, pioneer of the New Roman, left-wing intellectual who tended to see her daughter as frivolous, flirtatious and fickle an error of destiny… Great literature being preempted by its progenitor, Claude, who died this Tuesday, June 20 at the age of 95, will choose the mundane pen, the chatlette and cowhide style, will publish funny essays and well kits that prove that beneath the futility and witticisms pierced a true Parisian and literate culture.
How could it have been otherwise? Daughter of a lawyer and a famous writer of Russian origin, she was immersed in a bubbling environment and strived to squat the top podium in college. No choice. “At Easter, I was among the top three in the class, that’s what was needed, she remembered in the columns of the World. The summer holidays were coming back, and there I was again wallowing in my laziness. I love laziness! The upbringing is strict, her mother wanted boys – she will only have girls –, chooses unisex first names and puts away the dolls to replace them with tin soldiers. Every summer, Claude goes to boarding school when the parents go to the Soviet Union… Enough to shape a rebellious spirit in no time.
“I am Jewish and you are Jewish”
At 10, she learned of her Jewishness by chance, her non-religious mother not having seen fit to tell her about it. One day while talking with her grandfather, the young girl explains that the canteen is really not good, before adding: “Normal, because the steward is Jewish. And to tell her grandfather all the insults she hears about Jews in the schoolyard. It was then that her ancestor answered her: “What you apparently don’t know, my little girl, is that Jesus Christ is a Jew, I am a Jew and you are a Jew. The sky then falls on her head, especially when her school friends sincerely pity her by looking at her differently. Claude lived the Second World War in anguish, seeing his mother hiding in the Paris region to avoid denunciations.
At the Liberation, she dreams of clothes, make-up, scans women’s magazines and chooses to run the auditions to break on the boards… A disaster. She rings false, we choose her rivals and, after a few avant-garde pieces, she branches off into journalism thanks to the help of a benevolent lover who works at the World. She logically begins in the show section, assigned to copy texts, eats angry cow, cries regularly in the service staircase before having the right, supreme honor, to write a few titles and reviews. She was biding her time, branching off to the variety and television sections before refining her famous opinion piece for seven years, which gave her sudden fame on the last page of the newspaper.
Scandal at World
His unbridled and emancipated style hits the bull’s eye, his daily appointment is essential and becomes as watched as Plantu’s drawing on the front page. A real consecration which also earned her a lot of letters from grumpy people, shaken by so much frivolity at the heart of such a venerable institution… In short, Claude Sarraute became a star journalist, she released best-selling books, joined the band at Bouvard before to join that of Laurent Ruquier who pampers her and quickly considers her as his mother – he will offer her a memorable birthday for her 85th birthday with rum and white sand in Cuba and a role in her first play.READ ALSOThese “Big Heads” that must be deflated
Career plans she never knew. Claude has always taken what life has given him: laughter, alcohol, friends, husbands… and lots of lovers. She was married three times, an unbridled and assumed life which amused her greatly and nourished her perky books. First with an American journalist, then Christophe Tzara, the son of the poet Tristan Tzara, with whom she will have two boys. She will leave him for the philosopher Jean-François Revel, after the latter declared his love for her, as she told in her book Before you forget everything, written with Laurent Ruquier. “I’m going home, she says, my husband Christophe Tzara was not yet in bed and I tell him: I’m sorry, my darling, but there, I met someone, I absolutely have to redo my life with him, us, it’s over…” She will remain more than forty years with Revel, will have a last boy with him and will also adopt a girl.
Between them, a real bond of spirit, which does not prevent them from having separate lives by mutual agreement – she will live in particular a great passion with Hans, a German journalist whom she described as “virtuoso of the love “. “I took advantage of it,” she confided at the end of her life. Which did not prevent me, with shameless bad faith, from writhing with jealousy at the thought of those I described as her fat ones, evoking her husband’s mistresses.
Lovers and Facelift
As she gets older, she takes advantage of her grandchildren and her refuge house, in Brittany, opposite the island of Bréhat, a large white house in the middle of the pines. She regularly spends her holidays there, bathes every day – even at Christmas – and immerses herself in her writing work while contemplating the play of lights and tides… She recounts her memories, her lovers, her facelift and the pangs of old age with always the same frank and nasty style. “It’s not death that scares me, it’s old age! she confides in VOD at the dawn of his 90th birthday. Everything scampers off. I am threatened by the walker and I see the wheelchair coming! »
Her only consolation will have been to throw away the diuretics and appetite suppressants she had patiently ingested to maintain a dream figure for years… “All my life, I deprived myself to fight the bulges, she confided in her last interviews. . All this for what ? I have aged anyway! » Cheese, wine and champagne, a glass of rum before bedtime… Claude, the epicurean, was entering old age with the same naughty spirit.