Fabien Pascoe, who edited Telerama:, madly in love with a married man for twenty years before finally getting married and taking care of him. His book chronicles this consuming passion.
His name was Louis. Like listening. Default name for sound designer, director of France Musique. Fabienne Pascaud, 23, freelancer at: Telerama, met him in 1978 and was irradiated for life. He was married. He was madly in love with her. He said to him: “I could never live with someone who laughs so much.” He laughed harder, his heart breaking into pieces. She became pregnant. He begged her to have an abortion. He said no. The hell that lived as an ordeal lasted nineteen years. She ended up marrying him. Two years after the death of Louis Dandrel, Fabien Pascoe has exposed, at the same time, a dingo, a sorcerer, a tragic, an absolutist, an anachronism, fixed in the history of passion. a stone-cold and hieratic style to tell the fire of mad love. Attractive.
In the video, Super-8 years By Annie Erno and David Erno, excerpt
Madame Figaro . – In this extraordinary story you allude to witchcraft and your mediumistic power. Take it literally?
Fabien Pascoe. – Yes, especially since Louis, my man, had healing powers himself, clasped his hands together. Me, I’ve always lived with witchcraft… I suspect my grandmother from Berry was a witch; In order not to disturb him and to frighten me, he scratched the door and windows of my room in places that a woman of her size would not reach. I woke up and concluded that he was flying through the air. I quickly got a taste for spirits, started doing spiritualism, made objects move by looking at them. My parents were scared and the village priest banished me twice, but I have always lived with the invisible and I am very comfortable with it all.
loving a title that evokes the praying mantis devouring the male, but also magnetism and the lover; in short, all dimensions of love, from the most poetic to the most pathological.
I was the one who was magnetized by Louis. I gulped rather than devoured. Anyway, I can only love literature and theater, like the poems of Louise Labbe, who dared to declare her desire for a woman in the Renaissance. I am driven by romance, madness, overcoming, suffering, the absolute.
Is there no happy love?
Anyway, I realized much later, after he died, that Louis loved me. I have suffered tremendously, but without suffering I would not have attained this peace.
“He abandoned himself to the disease”
What do you miss the most after his death?
His hand. Take his hand. Moving forward in life, his hand in mine. A guiding hand. Like my father when I was 5-6 years old.
You write that Alzheimer’s disease, which turned Louis into a helpless amnesiac, was a source of joy for you.
When he was sick and therefore dependent on me, he became an angelic gentleness. I was his support, his sun. He only wanted to be with me. He told me all day that I was beautiful, which was never the case… He let himself get sick.
Were you helpless when dealing with Alzheimer’s disease?
I trained as a coach. You have to stand up to someone who always repeats the same thing. Both our sons passed this training. I washed and put on perfume every day. I touched and caressed. It was still a way of loving, humble…
Memory is at the heart of your story since your meeting in 1978. You mention the memory loss of Louis, who ended up calling you ma’am and never recognized you again. You add that you formed your memory “at a loss” for professional reasons.
I have always forced myself to try to forget. Without the ability to forget, I would have been dead a long time ago. I forget the damage done to me. As for the theater, going there every night and rediscovering famous texts and plays, I learned to forget what I had seen before. A kind of amnesia by command.
Did you dream that Louis is addicted to you?
Early on in our relationship, I had this crazy fantasy that he would get sick and become completely dependent on me. I would devote myself body and soul. I imagined him in a wheelchair, and I would spend my life pushing him, fascinated!
It’s even about your anthropophagic fantasies. Page: 114, we read “Eat your ashes with a spoon.”
We signed a contract. If he died before me, he would be cremated and I would eat his ashes. It made him howl with laughter. I told him. “I will put you in my yogurt every day, a little pinch of you, a spoonful, and I will swallow you every day so that you will stay in me forever.”
“This book is an ode to crazy love”
Is it good to be crazy? Crazy in love?
Yes! I have been for over forty years. This book is an ode to crazy love. When I got our second son to read it, he told me, “It’s crazy.” I respect her judgment and her discomfort. But I insist on those oceanic, paroxysmal feelings that leave you torn or broken, but which you can overcome. And since then, which make you live and no longer just survive like automatons… I accepted that Louis loved two women, me and him. I accepted everything. Otherwise, where is the love? I was waiting for that. And he came.
The death of Louis and the end of my position at the head of the editorial office due to the age limit was a double bereavement.
Fabien Pascal
Is it an anti-modern or “contemporary” story, a testimony that might offend the feminist conscience? The woman waits, accepts to be disrespected, taken away and thrown away, to become “second”, as Colette wrote, to be made invisible, and at the same time she relentlessly persecutes. In short, it is an anachronistic scandal.
And yet, I am a feminist. While fully insisting on what I did.
Which gives birth to crushing confessions. “Have the courage to deny myself for him. before whom I no longer had pride. More precisely, the supreme pride of not having any more pride. To be beyond.’ You don’t mess with absolutes, Fabien Pascoe.
I assume everything. Because everything has been said. Drunk confession. To convey his truth.
Tell everyone. Until the sexual abuse of Louis and you by the priests during your childhood.
We both had a difficult relationship with the Catholic religion. Louis was abused by the priest as a child. He perceived it as absolute hatred towards churchmen. Which did not prevent him from going to the Church of the Sacred Heart in Paris almost every day. I was sexually assaulted by a friend of the family priest. I was younger than 10 years old. The speech of my childhood was inaudible. However, I remained a believer. An ardent Catholic and mystic of mad love.
Writing the book coincided mainly with the end of your activity Telerama. From January, as a simple theater scholar, you only have to submit your articles on time. You shipped, what allowed the sincerity of your story?
Yes, the death of Louis and the planned end of my position as editor-in-chief due to the age limit was a double bereavement. Writing the book allowed me to rediscover Louis. The book is finished and in bookstores. I only have his thoughts, his clothes, jackets and pants that I cut to my size, and his ashes next to my bed. I mourned Telerama.
Correcting a dossier dedicated to memory.
It made sense. Today, in this winter of 2023, the feeling of emptiness is endless.
You say that you regularly lie on Louis’s grave, which will one day be yours. Does death not scare you?
Death is a friend. He is with me every day. I found this chain that I wear around my neck in my great aunt’s closet. I have always lived with death.
Through this story you offer a grave, in the sense of XVIIe period, tomb, to the man of your life, whom you conquered with a great struggle. So we can’t say no.
It works. “No” never happened.
Chanel’s literary meeting in the video. carte blanche to Anne Berest
Source: Le Figaro
