At 92, Diane de Margerie no longer really has the opportunity to come to Chartres, and no longer grants interviews.
It’s understandable, but we would have really liked to discuss with her about her almost mystical love for the city and its cathedral.
Literature: Diane de Margerie will announce the Fémina Prize
An admiration that she expressed in a highly poetic way in her essay Chartres, the stone woman, originally published in 1989 by Gallimard.
This moving text was becoming difficult to find, unless you went rummaging through second-hand booksellers. It is now republished in pocket, at Arléa, and retains, three decades later, all its appeal.
A different look every time
The reader follows her, through the pages, in her dreamy quest for beauty and poetry. At the center of her work: the cathedral, which she never stopped rediscovering throughout her life.
Diane de Margerie winner of the Proustian Spring
This monumental silhouette, which reassures her by its apparent immortality, allows her to apprehend existence in all its complexity. Impossible, for her, to tire of this stone book which, depending on the mood or the light, takes on a different aspect each time.
“My love for Chartres goes back a long way; I do not see a single being who counts with whom I did not wish to share his beauty ”.
Diane de Margerie (Novelist)
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There is nothing touristy about this walk through the city’s thousand-year-old history. On the contrary, they are deeply intimate, and touch on the universal. Scholar, sometimes mystical, Chartres, the woman of stone unlike any other essay, and gives only one desire: to return, once again, to this cathedral, to get lost in it to find one’s way around.
Chartres, the stone woman, by Diane de Margerie, Arléa editions, 176 pages, € 9.
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Remi Bonnet
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