An account of the thirty-five-year relationship
between Blanche Meyer and Jean Giono

The artist/painter has dispersed the ashes of her mother, Blanche Meyer. All that remains of the unknown muse, totally ignored in all the biographies, are a few virtual silhouettes – nude, faceless female bodies – outlined in powdered white marble on huge canvasses. And an unpublished manuscript that Jolaine Meyer hands to me, calmly, carefully, with respect, without raising her voice, as though she were confiding a treasure. It's the moving account that her mother, Blanche Meyer, felt was necessary to write just prior to her death, the account of thirty-five years of secret love for the writer for whom she had inspired the best of his novels, those that are part of his literary second period, and of which the nearly thousand letters he wrote to her testify. Letters that she had the time to entrust before her death to the Beinecke Library at Yale University , where they are held in limited access.

One has to re-read all of Giono's works, those from 1940 until the end of his life. The circumstances, they are all her. That imprudent, passionate woman dissembled in the Adelina White in Pour saluer Melville and Noé , the young Pauline in Angelo and The Horseman on the Roof , the older Pauline in Mort d'un personnage , Julie in Moulin de Pologne , the character called Absent in L'iris de Suze . She is absent in all the critical works on Giono, omnipresent in all of the author's works from the very moment of their meeting, and through whom he achieved the sublime, it's always her. Or something taken from her, “pieces of her”, he frequently told her as he conceived his characters. And this colossal mystery of an entire life springs forth from the depths of oblivion, from novel to short story, from allegory to metaphor.

Blanche Meyer et Jean Giono
260 pages, 21.80 €
Editions Actes Sud, 2007

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