Paris (AFP)

Lucette Destouches, who died in the night from Thursday to Friday at 107, sacrificed her life to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, tirelessly pleading for posterity to be indulgent with her husband, who did not make her life easy.

"It was my fairyland," wrote about his wife the author of "Journey at the end of the night" (1932) and "Death on credit" (36), but also violently anti-Semitic pamphlets.

It had long opposed their reappointment to consent in 2017. But the Gallimard project was finally postponed sine die.

Lucette Destouches was bright and funny, discreet and original. His white hair framed a face with features long spared by time, like his silhouette forged by dance, arrested at over 85 years!

"Madame Céline" (title of a tribute book dedicated to her for her centenary) had not wanted to see a camera since the end of the 60s. "It's Celine who matters, I'm nothing" she assured.

It was in 1935 that Louis-Ferdinand Céline (born Destouches and who chose as pen name the name of his grandmother) meets a young and graceful dancer, Lucette Almanzor, born in Paris on July 20, 1912. He has 41 years old and intimidated. The couple does not see each other for a year and then falls in love.

- "His goodness, immense" -

The writer, who dedicated the "Voyage" to a dancer, the American Elizabeth Craig, considers this discipline as a bulwark against the heaviness (people but also the literary style) he hates. Lucette gives him his gaiety and his youth, in exchange, according to his expression, of "his head of man who has lived".

"It was by his kindness, immense, that he touched me the most," she explained. For him, "Lili", as he calls it, will stop the tours abroad that she was performing in a reputable company.

During those pre-war years, she watched him write, obsessively: "He could stay for hours, days on a word, until he heard it fall right. did not speak about it, neither did music, we were together with them and that was the most important thing. "

In February 1943, he married her at the town hall of the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris.

The couple left Paris in June 1944 for the hallucinating crossing of a Germany in flames and try to move to Denmark where Celine deposited gold. In October, accompanied by the Bébert cat and the actor Robert Le Vigan, they reach Sigmaringen.

It will be the subject of famous pages in the work of the writer ("From one castle to another", 1957). In March 1945, the Destouches managed to reach Copenhagen despite the bombings. After six years of chaos where, among other tests, Céline knows the prison.

- "Classical dance and character" -

Louis and Lucette returned to France in 1951. At 25 ter, route des Gardes, in Meudon (Hauts-de-Seine), she opened a dance class. A plaque indicates: "teacher of classical dance and character".

Decades later, students will say they are blown away by "what she could do with her belly, at the age of 80".

Life with a genius is not always funny but dance helps Lucette to hold. Anxious perpetual, hermit-hobo surrounded by animals, Celine rattles, does not go out, eats badly, stuffs himself with barbiturates. Silent, he is suddenly capable of long curses.

Every night he reads his last pages. She finds that he writes too often "shit". He answers that "the big words, it is necessary" in the books. In any case, in general, he speaks alone.

Personalities go to see her or see him, which is more difficult.

She always spoke of Louis in the present, long after his death, in 1961, at the age of 67.

"I understand that we do not agree with him," she assured those who are exhausted to understand how one can be so "good" and write books as hateful. As if she had given reason to the writer François Nourissier: "admire Céline, do not defend him".

© 2019 AFP