Suddenly the spotlight turn blue and the atmosphere at the ice rink rocks. In a few synchronous movements, the cheerleaders form a guard of honor and applaud to the rhythm of a cover ofI Will Survive spat out by the overhanging sound system. “Laaaa-la-la-la-la” repeat the supporters, flocked in black and fluorescent green (the colors of the Epinal Hockey Club), while the players slide, one by one, in the corridor formed by the girls at pompoms. They pick up speed there, then veer back and forth across the field like pinball balls on ice skates. Somewhere in the gallery, a bass drum makes thousands of pulses beat in unison. The kids, who came in large numbers, are standing, a smile of delight plastered to their faces.
It’s game night in Poissompré, the ice rink of the “agglo de communes” Epinal-Golbey. This Saturday, February 26, the local team receives the Sangliers Arvernes of Clermont-Ferrand. “Division 1: no room for error for the Epinal Hockey Club”, headlined Morning Vosges in its Sports section. While from the top of his 1.30 meter, “Maxine, young stroller of the club”, places the puck in the center of the field, the ice rink is almost silent. Until the first blow of the butt frees the cheers. A shiver runs through the ice. “Still, it builds something, doesn’t it?”
“It’s when it whips that it produces text”
The voice, soft, which watches for approval in the din of the stands is that of Nicolas Mathieu, writer, Prix Goncourt, and child of the country. On February 2, he released his latest novel, Connemarawhich has the luxury of a rave review and a sales success exceeding forecasts (more than 100,000 copies already sold according to Edistat, and its publisher Actes Sud is restocking by pallets). We follow the crossed destinies of two Vosgiens: Hélène, a class defector in burn-out of her Parisian success, and Christophe, who has never left his Lorraine village, where he lives with his father, sick, and his son. in joint custody. By the grace of hockey, he was a teenager admired by boys and desired by girls. In his forties, he tries to reconnect with winning and competing, despite his aging body.
The idea of making this sport one of the red threads of the novel germinated here, in Poissompré. This discipline of fellows cut like Canadian lumberjacks is a source of pride in Epinal, where the team has been doing feats for years. Nicolas Mathieu was interested in it as a spectator, teenager, then rediscovered the atmosphere somewhere around 2018. “I immediately liked the fervor, the warmth, and the dramaturgy, he explains. At the beginning of the match, it’s like the same spring stretched in thousands of hearts which is suddenly released. It’s when it whips that it produces text.”
With the help and advice of Nicolas Martin, the coach of the Spinalian team who gave him access to the changing rooms, the writer has therefore made hockey the instrument of a quest for dignity, and skating rink the ephemeral place of a repaired people. He writes, page 36: “There, town councilors in overcoats mingled with families in rows of onions, teenagers from the upscale neighborhoods elbowed toothless drunks who emptied pints of Picon beer at the bar […] In this city, the skating rink was like a belly where unanimities unfindable elsewhere were sketched out, in the cold and the breaking echo of irons on the ice. Two thousand eyes fixed on the same black point sliding at one hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. A whole people gathered around the oval ice for two hours, hoping for goals, speed and violence. The same desire in every chest.”
Fishy. So far from Montreal, and so close to ArcelorMittal. It is an understatement to say that in recent decades, Lorraine has suffered from deindustrialisation. By haemorrhagic waves. Between 2008 and 2012 alone, official statistics tell us, salaried employment in the manufacturing industry lost 15% of its battalions. More than 20,000 jobs lost in four years. Less 20% in the metallurgy, 13% in the automobile, 10% in the food industry… Of the “happy globalization”, some have only had a hangover. During the regional elections of 2021, the Grand Est region is the one which recorded the record for abstention, at 78%.
He said to them: “Hold on. Hold on”
But on game nights, it’s as if that doesn’t matter anymore. As if we could still have a common emotion. The bosses and the notables are in the gallery, like the workers, the caregivers, the forklift drivers or the cashiers. And their children with them. A sociology not very far, moreover, from the players themselves, who must all keep their profession on the side. A priesthood. “Hockey is extremely physical. I was surprised at the way the coach was talking to his players in the locker room. He said to them: ‘Come on little guys’. Without even shouting, nothing. He’s not into Rocky Balboa galvanizing. He’s like a worried dad, he’s like, ‘Hang on. Hold on’.”
This February 26, in the stands, with his Picon beer in hand, his wise sweater, his parka and his glasses, the Prix Goncourt 2018 is almost anonymous. Since his last book, and his promo, we still recognize him a little. Especially in the area. During the first break, two friends, laughing in their fifties, ask her for a selfie. One of them lingers with the writer to talk about Connemara. “I liked Lison, because she makes the men pay”, she slips to him before returning to her place. (Lison is a humanist and generous plague character, who punishes the machismo of two dashing provincial executives by seducing them and blackmailing them.) In the evening, he will be arrested two more times for a request for a photo. In a bar, a young girl, perhaps a student, takes her courage in both hands. “I didn’t expect to meet Nicolas Mathieu, if I had known…”
It’s not every day you get celebrities around here. The corner saw the birth of the sociologist Emile Durkheim and the painter Claude Gellée, known as Le Lorrain, who is not the most famous of classical painters – but he would also have invented “puff pastry”, specifies his Wikipedia file. In any case, it gives its name to one of the streets leading to Place des Vosges, the beating heart of Epinal, where we sat down the afternoon before the match. At the brasserie du Commerce, a black and white portrait of Philippe Seguin, clenched jaw and white beard, watches over customers. Here is the big man. The Vosges de Gaulle. Mayor of Epinal from 1983 to 1997, “he printed a pride, and decided on absolutely everything: up to the course dedicated to the practice of urban kayaking, laughs Nicolas Mathieu. I believe that many Spinaliens are still sad that he was not buried here.” He nevertheless left them his library (of 6,800 works all the same).
The match over – Epinal won 8 to 1 against the Sangliers Arvernes – the writer agreed to take us to the restaurant where he usually goes after hockey nights. “Asian restaurant, wok and grilled meats”, proclaims the sign, set with two dragons in red neon. The light from the large bay window promises a little warmth in the jam-packed car park of this Lorraine Saturday. Inside, around ten buffets, imposing and generous, dispense their dishes at will in the center of a huge room without partitions in which everyone mixes. You have to believe that Nicolas Mathieu likes what makes communion. He scrutinizes, worried, our reaction. We reassure him. We also love. Worry insists: “But I love in the first degree.” Always this fear of opening up one’s world to those who would look at it the way one visits the Thoiry zoo. We reassure him again. But the worry will return. There is something unappeasable in these echoing anxieties. An endless game of mirrors between shame and the shame of being ashamed, as Albert Cohen so aptly described.
The left hypokhâgne and the left bac pro
Nicolas Mathieu doesn’t really like the idea of being a spokesperson. Writer is already a lot. “Describing is political,” he argues. But thanks to the campaign and the success of Connemara, he is a de facto spokesperson. On February 13, on France 5, he made an exit in the emission policy on the left, which for a long time no longer addresses the world from which it comes: “It’s good that there is a hypokhâgne, lyrical, erudite left, open to the world; but it’s also good that there is a ‘bac pro’ left, which is interested in people who work in warehouses, in nurses, in people who drive trucks, vans, in small towns… These interests deserve to be be supported, defended These lifestyles deserve to be defended. […] There is a France of barbecues, yes. And she has the right to exist and be represented.” The video has been viewed more than 400,000 times on Twitter alone.
The man is constantly worried, worked. A part of him keeps distancing himself from the other. He does not believe in the Manichaean exaltation of the “good sense” of the “good people”. “The idea of common decency has always bothered me: I come from the working classes, and sometimes I look in vain for ‘decency'”, he told us in November 2019, in an interview with L’Express. But the overhanging gaze of those who find the lives of his corner of the world (which he had described in his previous opus) “to hang himself” stung him to the point of having fomented it Connemara. A book to say that there are no “sub-lives”. That in the France of pavilions, too, we have glories and tachycardias.
At the end of the match, this evening of February 26, the Spinal players made a lap of honor, with their children in their arms. There were half-asleep babies in their sleeping bags, and older ones waving their handcuffs to the grateful supporters. The fathers glided on their skates, proud as fathers who have just won. Yes. Sure. We saw. That “it builds something”.