Grégoire Bouillier's book is called "The heart does not yield", a sentence from the diary that this 63-year-old Parisian kept during her agony.

For decades, the writer was haunted by this "drama of loneliness" he had heard told one night on France Culture.

He had hit the headlines for a weekend, after the discovery of the mummified body of a woman who had died nine months earlier, in November 1984.

Grégoire Bouillier's investigation reveals a host of hidden facts, delayed scoops, distortions.

For example that, contrary to what a journalist with an overly free imagination had written at the time, the neighbors had not been alerted by the smell.

But not at all: according to residents of the building where this tragedy took place, at the foot of the Montmartre hill, the maggots which devoured the corpse then attacked the floor, until they fell into the apartment below. .

"An opera"

"The image is strong enough that there is no need to add more," said the writer, interviewed by AFP at the Correspondances literary festival in Manosque (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence).

"When I finished I would have liked, and I thought it would be 500, 550 pages. And when they put it in the model it was 900," he recalls.

"My goal was not to make a big book: I know that it is complicated, that it weighs heavily".

The publisher, Flammarion, did not request a cut.

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Le Monde speaks of "a few lengths, inevitable when one wants to account for all the facets of reality", but of a "book as intellectually stimulating as it is deeply sensitive".

At the Goncourt Prize jury, the novel has two declared followers (out of 12 jurors).

Pierre Assouline wrote his admiration.

President Didier Decoin told France Inter that it was his "absolute favorite", namely "a news item that is really sordid, odious, ugly, ugly, and he ends up doing an opera".

It was not without difficulty.

"There was something that was complicated, it was that I had nothing on Marcelle Pichon. Nothing, no material", says the author.

He no longer even knows, when he launches out, the name of this woman, nor when exactly she died.

But it will be enough to find his identity, in the audiovisual archives (INA), the words "model", his former profession, and "hunger", the cause of his death.

Horoscope

How does a "book about nothing", as Gustave Flaubert dreamed of, end up taking on such gargantuan proportions?

Grégoire Bouillier will spend more than three years pulling all possible threads.

The genealogy of this woman, the traces left by her life and that of those close to her, the historical context in which she lived, what the survivors of this story think of her, even the birth chart (surprisingly revealing) established by Élizabeth Teissier: everything goes, or even more.

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The Pichons come from Indre?

Opportunity to revisit the history of poverty in Berry.

Marcelle Pichon was a model at Jacques Fath?

Grégoire Bouillier discovers that this great fashion designer is described in the CIA archives as close to the Nazi occupiers.

The story is dark, the biography of Marcelle Pichon crossed by pain, and the memories of those who knew her at the end of her life rather bitter.

Yet the book is joyous, leaping from discovery that rewards stubbornness to miraculous discovery.

Grégoire Bouillier, who at 62 had never attracted crowds, sees that "people seem incredibly enthusiastic" about this treasure hunt.

© 2022 AFP