During the night of January 2, 1949, the inhabitants of Corps-Nuds (Ille-et-Vilaine) intended to ring the death knell. A few hours earlier, eighteen footballers from the village died in a road accident. On May 4, 1988, a joyful chime sounded from the same church to celebrate the found freedom of a child in the country after three years of captivity in the Hezbollah jails. Between these two bell sounds, between the evocations of two trauma, one collective, the other staff, The accident unfolds unexpectedly.
Save a swallowed world
Jean-Paul Kauffmann seems less concerned to investigate the fatal outing of the Dodge truck, also less concerned with returning to the conditions of his detention in Lebanon (to the point of making an error on the date of her release!) Than to reconstruct a shed paradise. That of a childhood spent in the countryside in the 1950s: “I belong to this lost continent, the “Old world” : A rural company before mechanization, France of agricultural comices, employers’ festivals, which believes in the supernatural. A country punctuated as a century earlier by the ringing of the bells, the course of fixed and mobile festivals. A time when the individual still exchanged with nature without the desire to dominate or destroy it. »»
With parents named Marcel and Odette, difficult to avoid Proustian references – especially since, underlines Kauffmann, “This era had hardly changed since the beginnings of the Third Republic”. As in Research, The discovery of reading forever modifies the relationship to the world. As in Researchthe meditations take on the color of church stained glass. As in Researchit is a question of saving from the waters of oblivion a swallowed world: “This cosmological order would soon cease to exist: farmers would succeed the peasants. An Agreste civilization threw its last fires. »»
A world where religion occupied a central place, symbolized by the incongruous neo-Byzantine bell tower (the title of the book is also to be heard in the architectural sense) and by two enigmatic figures: the parish priest Paul Brionne and the cousin Georges Rousseau, a priest whose career is veil from several gray areas. The little Jean-Paul serves the first as a choir child and speaks with the second on the occasion of his unexpected visits, without managing to identify the personality of these cold men with their flocks or with their hierarchy.
What remains of inelucidated in our Youths nonetheless contributed to training the beings that we have become, such is the teaching of this beautiful story, such is the mystery of all existence. To which Kauffmann sometimes gives the outside of humor: “A choir of choir who observes in gentleness can prove to be a most presentable journalist” – The daily smell of bread baked in the bakery of the paternal bakery would have also developed the flair of the future reporter.
This perhaps hides more painful realities, which is named in these pages a “Inadherence to the world” or a “Impression of denominating”. If Jean-Paul Kauffmann places his memories under the sign of a tragedy, it is because “The drama belongs to the strangeness, even to the oddity present throughout (its) life “.
