Women who are more or less forgotten to be rehabilitated (as Olivier Guez did with Gertrude Bell last year) have become a marketing chestnut. Jean de Saint-Cheron found a more original niche: taking out the mothballs of female religious figures and talking about them in a very lively, even funny way, in the wake of a certain holy literary trinity formed by Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy and Georges Bernanos. Two years after a book on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (Praise of a warrior), which was a bookstore success, Saint-Cheron returns with a more specialized subject: Malestroit tells the incredible life of Yvonne Beauvais (1901-1951), who was much more than “powerful”, “inspiring” or other empty epithet – it is not General de Gaulle who will contradict us, we will come back to that.
Born into the bourgeoisie, young Yvonne had a clear destiny: to marry an engineer and give him numerous descendants. Problem: from early childhood, she discovers Story of a soul by Thérèse of Lisieux, and wants to imitate her. Very early on, she served the poor in the most deprived neighborhoods of the Parisian suburbs. She renounces marriage and becomes a good sister in Malestroit, in Brittany. Suffering from migraines even worse than those of Blaise Pascal, she is not ordinary: flowers appear in her mouth, she fights the devil physically, bears the stigmata of Christ and has the gift of bilocation (she can be in two places at the same time) – yes, this story ventures into the supernatural, believers will say; or in the paranormal, the unbelievers will respond.
When the Second World War broke out, Yvonne joined the Resistance. The clinic she opened in Malestroit allows her to treat dozens of injured people. She hid Jews, resistance fighters and allied paratroopers before and after being tortured by the Gestapo. In June 1945, she received the Croix de Guerre with palm. A month later, de Gaulle himself traveled to Vannes to present him with the Legion of Honor. After discovering himself, he salutes the “magnificent conduct” of this nun like no other. She will become his guardian angel, as well as that of his wife. Yvonne de Gaulle in fact devoted a sort of cult to Yvonne Beauvais – from 1945, she kept an image of the nun on her person. On August 22, 1962, after 14 bullets fired from a machine gun hit the presidential DS during the Petit-Clamart attack, the first lady of France was categorical: her couple owed their salvation to the protection of the other Yvonne , who watches over them from up there. Not everyone will have this devotion. After her death in 1951, a file for Yvonne’s canonization was submitted to the Vatican. But, in 1960, Cardinal Ottaviani opposed going further in the study of his case, for this hallucinatory reason on the part of a man of the Church: “Too many miracles.” If he were still alive, Ottaviani would break out in a cold sweat reading Malestroit…
Far from ideology
Devious minds will note that this book is published by Grasset, therefore by Hachette, owned by Vincent Bolloré. The hagiography of a nun from Morbihan, this has everything to delight the Breton billionaire. After proselytizing in its media (at Paris Match yesterday, at JDD today), will he now transform his publishing houses into convents and presbyteries? Last year, Amandine Cornette de Saint Cyr did well with Help Saint Ritapublished by Fayard, another Hachette subsidiary. Let’s reassure the priest eaters: Vincent Bolloré is not yet gifted with bilocation, and he does not have the time to dictate their books to the authors in his group.
In retracing the journey of Yvonne Beauvais, Saint-Cheron never engages in ideology (anti-woke crusade, etc.). He even manages to quote Françoise d’Eaubonne, the ecofeminist philosopher who, in 1971, was co-founder of the flamboyant Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action (FHAR)! The way he dusts off this a priori supremely old-fashioned literary genre that is the life of a saint recalls the Yann Moix of Death and life of Edith Steinpublished in 2008. We feel, especially in the second part of the story, where it features Nazis who seem to have escaped from The Big Mopthat Saint-Cheron frees himself from the archives on which he works to flirt with fiction. Will he convert to the novel for good in the future? We will closely follow his next books.
Malestroit, par Jean de Saint-Cheron. Grasset, 215 p., €20.
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