TestimonialsFor this series, journalist and director Stefania Rousselle sets off on the roads of France, with a simple question: “How are you? This week, Stéphanie Viguié, 49, family assistant, carer and cleaning lady in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, in Aveyron.
” I was 20 when the Miss France committee decided to organize the Miss Midi-Pyrénées election here, in Villefranche-de-Rouergue. The problem is that no girl from the city showed up for the competition. Alain, the organizer on site, still said to himself that it was a bit stupid to organize something and not have a candidate from Villefranche. Me, it’s true that with my father’s structural steel business I was a little known around here. So Jean-Paul, one of Alain’s friends, whom I knew very well, came to see me: “Come on, Stephanie, sign up! – Listen to me. I want to participate, but who is on the jury? Because I don’t want to be elected. Sequins, heels, it was not my thing. My thing was sports. It was basketball. I was doing the French championships, all that. I had short hair. I wasn’t a Barbie, I didn’t have blue eyes. “But yeah, don’t worry, I’m in the jury, we’re going to make sure you don’t get elected.” Well, it didn’t miss. I found myself Miss Midi-Pyrénées. What the fuck is this? Here I am off to Euro Disney for the preparation course for the Miss France competition. But also at the dog fair, doing fashion shows, going to parties where there are only old schnocks. What the hell was I doing there? Well, I didn’t win, but I suspected it.
“My husband went with me because I was the woman to have. I was the Miss”
It was around the same time that I met my husband. He went with me because I was the woman to have. I was the Miss. We got married, I was 26. I had my two children very quickly. But as soon as the little one was 6 months old, I decided to have a separate room. Because he went out a lot, he went clubbing, he drank. I learned that he was going to look elsewhere and I didn’t want to get shit, no, but oh! Two or three times he came home drunk and tried to break down my door to have sex. It was quite violent, what I experienced. I weighed 45 kilos when I met him and I went up to 110, so I was not well with him. “You’re a big cow, you’re a big shit, you’re worth nothing.” He spent his time telling me. And that, for sixteen years – until he left with another, younger one.
A side life
My father was a womanizer, too. Style, when I was 12, he kept me informed of all his romantic escapades. For my mother’s birthdays and at Christmas, he gave me his card and said: “Well, come on, you’re going to buy your mother a present, anyway, I don’t like her.” And why was he staying with her? Because it was like a lot of men, he didn’t want to be alone. But, in the end, my father and I got on well. Apparently, I look a lot like her mom, I have a bit of the same character traits. I worked with him in our structural steel business. I did the accounts, the recruitment, all the paperwork, I loved it. But when I had my kids, my father didn’t realize that I had become a mother, that I had a life on the side. I didn’t want to upset him, so I continued to work. I spared, as they say, the goat and the cabbage. My children, I didn’t see them, they were ten hours a day with the nanny. Then the business started losing revenue, and my dad wouldn’t listen to my advice. It was getting complicated between us. We ended up being placed in compulsory liquidation. And, in court, my father didn’t even wear his balls to say that he was as responsible as I was in all of this. He preferred to blame everything on me. For a very long time after that, whenever I saw him, I either threw up or had diarrhea. Like with my husband.
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