All biography

My first ten years are set in a charming Gard village, Saint-Geniès-de-Malgoirès, located on the railway line that connects Nîmes to Alès. Small village without history, born from the meeting of several farmhouses devolving to the culture of the vine. He was particularly proud of having elected, in 1790, the first black mayor of a French commune, Louis Guizot. But since the nineteenth century, time seemed to stop here. I have known this village only through the clouds of dust raised by the constant comings and goings of carts carrying men and animals, hay and grapes. At the time, the paths still had the immaculate whiteness of the crushed stone.

My father was the pharmacist of the village. In other words, a kind of notable, just like the parish priest, the teacher or the doctor. Besides, I was not far from thinking that he was the true master of the commune, and each one indifferently confided to him his states of mind and his gastric disorders.

I loved my school, which had two female teachers. Rumor had it that they were together. It did not seem to bother anyone, especially my parents who showed a great tolerance on this subject. one of the two was particularly related to my parents and led my father to the Communist Party. As proof of our unwavering ties, we embarked the two young ladies on a memorable trip on the French Riviera aboard the 4CV of my father. I found myself in the back firmly wedged between the two young ladies who were doing well.

When I think of this childhood, a series of "first time" is set in this village. Met on the school benches, Jojo was my first and big friend, the one with whom we share the great secrets and the first intimate caresses. The war and the rumors of liberation saw all sorts of refugees flocking to our doors. Some day, arrived by whole trucks containing Polish, Hungarian or African. In the village square, I gazed at them, fascinated. This is where, for the first time, I saw a little black girl. I adored him and I particularly liked his frizzy hair, a texture so different from mine. In exactly the opposite way, I was also captivated by a little Polish girl, Wanda with a pale complexion and mats, like the little Russians in my illustrated books. Instead of being scared, like so many other children, I was very attracted by these beings so different from me. It is true that I was lucky, in my childhood, to have as a playmate, a cousin Franco-Cambodian named Jean-Lou that I immediately loved.

In my memory, it is a memory of heat that continues. A heat that shatters and crushes everything, forcing a few rituals like the closing of thick shutters. When my grandmother wanted to find some cool, she took me by the hand and we went on a ride. At first we passed the river, where some washerwomen still came to play the beater, and we left our steps to guide us to the cemetery. The many trees that dotted it made it a popular place for villagers. Like many other villages in the region, Saint-Genies lived in a state of withdrawal. Few people came and the opportunity to leave was rare. Sometimes my mother put me in the basket of her bike and, with a few pedal strokes, we went to the nearby village of Saint-Bauzély to order our dresses from the local seamstress. Other celebrations led us to Saint-Maurice-de-Cazevieille where my father found his former war buddies at happy big tables where participants were not asked to push the ditty. It was not uncommon for me to come and sing My bel angel is going to sleep, the lullaby of Mozart, or My Normandy, accompanying me with the piano.

When I was old enough to enter the 6th, we went to Nîmes. This departure towards the city sounded the death knell of my carefree childhood. But what could a big city look like? I had never seen one before. As soon as I arrived, a color became obvious: black. "I do not want to stay here! Was my first cry of revolt. I had to make a reason for myself. My father opened a new pharmacy 106 Chemin Bas d'Avignon, near the Catholic cemetery, just below the railway line. The pharmacy was on the ground floor, our apartment above the railway. The steam locomotives glided along the tracks, throwing heavy swirls of black smoke, greasy and smelly, which permeated everything in its path: the walls, sidewalks and even the clothes that my mother insisted on extending. on our terrace.

Every morning, I walked to the girls' school on a dismal path along the Talbot Boulevard railway. It is now a good time to pretend that one was "dumb" or "rebellious" in his youth. I was neither one nor the other and I liked this school as soon as I arrived in Nîmes. I loved his architecture, his yard. In addition, I had fun to find good friends including my friend Annie. I also had a French teacher whom I loved, Mrs Piollet. A very young war widow, with a crazy charm, dressed in black from head to foot. I owe him my love of this subject and my taste for literature. At the bac, I was awarded a 16/20 in French composition for commenting on the quote from the poem Verlaine. " Music before anything else ". In Latin, it was still going, because my mother "concreted" with private lessons. By cons, my nullity in math would have given you an idea of ​​infinity ...

When I gained a little more freedom, I walked a lot in the city. I particularly liked the gardens of La Fontaine. I remember in particular a legend that my father told me. The origin of the resurgence being then very mysterious, he claimed that, under the basin, there was an abyssal source at the bottom of which was buried the Golden Calf. That impress me a lot. I was afraid of falling there by coming too close and being forever engulfed. The gardens are also linked to my first love emotions - the first kiss with a young high school student - and my first sexual spates. Around 14-15 years, "big" had dragged me to the top of the garden where was raging an exhibitionist in the raincoat.

The Nîmes of the 1950s looked like a teenager movie with, on the program, flirting on the boulevards, gray-beige Vespa and jukeboxes in the cafes. At the end of the afternoon, the main entertainment consisted of walking up and down the boulevard Victor-Hugo that of high school Daudet, frequented by forts themes and girls of good family. It was said to "do the ball". Me, I preferred to go train on the Boulevard Gambetta, more workman, or better, on the Boulevard Amiral Courbet and his Cafe de l'Industrie, where were found footballers and supporters of Nîmes Olympique. At that time, football was fairly mythical in Nîmes and, in our heads of midinettes, the footballers symbolized a male ideal, a pledge of manliness against which small pimples high school did not weigh heavy.

From the height of my 15 years, I shamelessly looked at Jeannot and Jos, local James Dean in scooters, sporting black jackets and first blue jeans, ragazzi straight out of Pasolini's future films. I shamelessly combed the clouds of young gardians in their floral shirts, evolving in the wake of a famous manadier or an old aristocratic painter. The Nîmes of my childhood had "something of Tennessee", a putrid and very secretive side. It was strewn with austere houses with windows protected by wrought-iron gates, in which lived old ladies in their dressing gowns, with wig-wigs.

As soon as I could escape, I sat on the terrace of the Grande Bourse, facing the Arena. When a boy came to connect me asking me what I was doing, I took a haughty air before launching a "I make cinema in Italy!". All because I had read in a magazine that Marine Vlady was shooting in Italy.

It is true that we went to the cinema a lot with my parents, without ever worrying about the genre or the status of the work. One week we went to see Jean Boyer's Paris and Jean Cocteau's next Orphie. My first movie actresses were Pier Angeli and Leslie Caron. Androgynous heroines that I could easily identify with. Very quickly, I got used to dressing through the modes of cinema. The discovery of Leslie Caron in Papa Long Legs causes my rush on the fabric stores to make the range of the interpreter: a striped jacket and matching pants.

In the columns of the newspaper Elle, I scanned the classifieds of productions looking for the future interpreter Wheat bud or Hello sadness. My missives, written with the ardor of adolescence, remained inevitably unanswered. A year later, I went to see the film indoors. Because if I dreamed of cinema, to make it remained inaccessible for the young provincial without relation that I was.

Fortunately, other artistic expressions remained within my reach. When my father saw that I was wearing my rope sneakers on tiptoe, he said, "The girl has to dance! ". My mother, a descendant of an old Protestant Cévenol family, did not see this as a very good thing. She kept repeating, "Lafont histrion!", Which reflected the lack of consideration she gave to this activity. I started dancing at age 11 with Nina Sereni, ballet mistress at the Opera of Nîmes. She gave classes three times a week in an Opera room used for rehearsals of passing companies. Soon to classify "half-character" by my teacher, I enjoyed relative freedom and thus detach myself from the battalion of ballerinas. I alternately played the devil in Walpurgis Night and a character just as bouncy in Crow's Bells. When the Opera House burned down in 1952, we continued the lessons at the communal home, Place de la Calade, on the site of the current theater, this time under the direction of Micheline Bonardi.

During holidays and weekends, my parents and I headed for Saint André de Valborgne, where was the large maternal family home. For my mother, her house was everything! And my father, Nîmes of stock and resolutely city dweller, engulfed for love all his income as a pharmacist in the maintenance of this building.

Not being able to conceive a boy likely to ensure the descent of this prestigious lineage was a bit annoying for my parents. But with a bit of imagination, everything was still possible. My mother went so far as to call me Bernard to make reality coincide with his dream. Until I was ten years old, I gaily worn the breeches and the vest. In exchange for the lace to which I was not entitled, I benefited from an education of little male to which I saw nothing to complain about. On the contrary. While a little girl would have remained confined to the house, in her mother's petticoats, I was allowed to run the campaign alongside my father, fishing in the streams, finding the largest porcini mushrooms and medicinal herbs necessary for his apothecary preparations.

The Cevennes of my childhood, remained in their juice since time immemorial, did not resemble any other campaign. I discovered, amazed, a strange country populated by peasants already aged, who spoke most often in patois to which I remained foreign. When, extraordinary, they spoke French, they used sublime images. There was one, for example, who, at the moment of leaving you, was intoning to give you goosebumps: "Oh, we do not say goodbye. The mother of days is not dead yet! ".

From our isolated house in the Vallée Borgne, by taking a small path that wandered through the heaths and holm oaks, we arrived a few kilometers further to Auzillargues, a place populated by quite amazing people. I remember a certain Arthur. Poet at his hour, he told us that in his village lived a wild boar with gold teeth and flying snakes. It must be said that with what he was dropping every day, he had something to fertilize his imagination in the long term ... In the same village also resided a very old and particularly scary widow, provided with a huge goitre and decked out with two girls. The eldest, who had fallen into madness at the age of 13 or 14, was immediately confined to Mondevergues, an asylum in the region. The younger girl was not slow in her turn. Summer and winter, she was walking half-naked through the streets. Dirty as a comb, her gray mop in battle, she held at arm's length a great ax she was twirling before throwing herself with all her weight on the first mulberry tree that had been wrong to cross her path. It must be said that she had only one passion in life: cutting trees. I remember as if it was yesterday his powerful laughter that discovered a toothless mouth, but also large patches of dried blood, that of his period, which stained his thighs. It looked like a drawing of Doré to illustrate a Grimm's tale! But more was needed to frighten my grandmother, who, full of duties and very good, would, whatever happens, return her two monthly visits to their mother. "What if your daughter thinks you are a tree? My mother kept repeating to her, without ever being able to discourage her. As for me, these stories put my head upside down. The Cevennes was really the cradle of the marvelous and the strange.

The most ordinary everyday life took on a fantastic and a little frightening dimension.My first memories of these campaigns go back to my fifth birthday and are quite brutal. During the hottest summers, I remember a proliferation of snakes. No vipers, who loved limestone soils, but large snakes of water and huge snakes - including the famous Aesculapian snake that can measure more than a meter long.

Two childhood memories are especially related to snake stories. One of my aunts lived in one of these charming villas built in the nineteenth century, covered with greenery. One day, while visiting him, I crossed on the staircase which led to the first floor an immense snake, of more than a meter, which borrowed a way opposite to mine. I let you imagine my screams! The other memory is set in the terrace of our house where under a thick arbor of Virginia creeper, took place our traditional Sunday meals. One summer's day, the end of a peaceful meal was disturbed by a swarm of birds chirping over our heads, then by the sudden fall of a huge snake in the fruit bowl. The animal had been surprised, then probably unbalanced by this swarm of protective mothers as she feasted on their broods. The snake was slaughtered before to have run away. But, with the complicity of my father, I organized for him a burial with great pomp.

Animals in general were a big part of our life in Cevennes. There was a farm with goats - but also sheep, chickens and a horse, used for plowing. A reading of my childhood is a perfect illustration of what I experienced then, Henri Bosco's Ane Culotte. I had no trouble projecting myself into the character of the little boy, Constantine, who discovers a lost paradise where wild animals live without fear with a mysterious old man.

My favorite play area was the gardens that surrounded the family home, but also the attics filled with old fashioned and clothing. Very quickly, the Cevennes became my theater. My friends and I were frantically firing in the trunks of the attic the disguises necessary for our shows. Our repertoire was very wide, it ranged from Dr. Walker's Four Daughters to Hamlet. Pieces of raw silk, almost white, were perfect for embodying sweet Ophelia and her flaxen hair. The choice of characters really mattered little. We played in turn each of the main roles, animated above all by the troubled pleasure of disguising ourselves.

Beyond our shows, I realize today how the representation occupied a large place in the house. My grandmother also had a magic lantern and organized regular screenings. Finally, on all the walls, painted portraits of my great grandmothers, dressed in their old costumes and wearing long hair, seemed to stare at me, as if to forbid me to commit too much mischief.

Bernadette Lafont, from the book "Bernadette Lafont, a movie life"