Suzanne is a respectable young woman, raised in a convent where she learns good etiquette, cookery and the rudimentary
education
necessary in order to make her a
perfect wife for a notable. What is more, she is pretty, sings beautifully and loves to dance. At 17 she meets her Prince Charming in the form of an up-and-coming courteous young man who is cultured and ambitious, whom she marries...A love story? Not really. The perfect wife of the high-ranking civil servant will be beaten almost to death, will learn how to hide her bruises with make-up and smiles during the receptions at the ministry and face up to having three children in three years...then it will end with her escaping, barely alive, but she will lose her son and her daughters whom she will only see again sixteen years later. A powerful, shocking and out of the ordinary story since it is written by a woman who is by no accounts feminist and who had no hope, throughout the entire book, other than to tell her life story truthfully, without adding or abridging anything. Even her excision (since she lived a long time in Africa with her diplomat husband) is only mentioned accidentally, without seeming to attach much importance to it. In the final episode, Suzanne brings to mind the character of Agnes in Molière's The School of Wives. She is reconditioned. It is the 'perfect wife', as every religion imagines her, that she has escaped from, owing only to a 'deficient'
education. In short, the art of being badly brought up. A testimony that will go down in history. "Le petit garçon qui courrait derrière un taxi" ("The Little Boy Who Ran After a Taxi"), Suzanne Rousseau, éditions H.BL, available on the editor's website larrive.info, 18 euros in languedocienne libraries.