At the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, on a small cinerary monument, there is a plaque with his name, “Mathieu Simonet (1972-…)”, and this fact alone could define him. Novelist, former lawyer, facilitator of writing workshops at Sciences Po and the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), doctoral student (his thesis focuses on “collective literary experiences”), short-lived president of the Société des gens de lettres, he stands between the worlds: that of the living and the dead, the sick and the healthy, poetry and activism, literature and law.
This June evening, in the Saint-Louis chapel of Pitié-Salpêtrière, in Paris, Mathieu Simonet, 51, is very much alive. He very matter-of-factly checks that there are enough pretzels and cups for everyone. With Michèle Lévy-Soussan, the head of palliative care at the Paris hospital, he brought together a small gathering of people who came to hear about recitherapy, the idea of combining storytelling with medicine. It is a question of “right words” in care, literature that accompanies the end of life and also the way of “heal with our ghosts”.
Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur came to talk about the ghost of Romain Gary, who inspired his latest book There is no Ajar (Grasset, 2022). At his side, the forensic doctor and archaeo-anthropologist Philippe Charlier decrees: “When ghosts appear, it’s always to tell us something. » Everyone seems to agree, ghosts exist, and they speak to the living. Mathieu Simonet knows it well, the subject of his new book, The End of the Clouds (Julliard), was whispered to her by a spirit, that of her husband, Benoît Brayer, who died at the age of 46 from cancer and whose ashes rest in an urn awaiting that of Mathieu Simonet.
“I love seeing people write together”
The day after this meeting, participants will all receive an email inviting them to a “serious writing game” to each tell the story of the event in their own way. Getting people to write: this is an obsession for Mathieu Simonet. “It’s like teaching them to swim,” and maybe also save them. He had prisoners in the Villepinte remand center (Seine-Saint-Denis) write down their dreams; adolescent memories to patients of the Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris; he invited high school students to speak, anonymously, about what made them ashamed. “I love seeing people write together, he said. It’s a bit like when everyone is on a dance floor. »
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