Companion of Marguerite Duras for sixteen years, Yann Andréa played an essential role with her. She sank in depression after the death of the author of "The Lover" , and in 1996 he met the publisher Maren Sell, who offered to write. It will be " This love" , a very Durassian tale, between creative "up" and "down" alcoholic.

As tetanized by the irremediable lack of the absent, Yann Andréa is carried away by orange vodka and a frightening mental and physical petrification. Maren Sell tries to get him out by the words. A book sewed of exchanges was born, on which came to pose a history of flesh and love with, never, far, the crushing ghost of Marguerite Duras. "History" is the tangled account of this lost race against the clock, with the words, believed, to say it.

MC: Do you remember the first time you saw Yann Andréa?

Maren Sell: It was winter. I had lunch with a friend at the Closerie des Lilas. Yann was alone at a table. The open shirt, barefoot in shoes with the laces defeated, a huge forehead all smooth, eyes of an intense brown. A survivor. It was almost his first exit after months of depression, following the death of Marguerite Duras.

Did he tell you about her that day?

He spoke only of her, but in a playful way, smiling at her own melancholy.

He writes for you "That love", then dark again. You propose to him to deposit under the mat of your office bits of texts to which you will answer ...

Writing was for him a matter of survival. To compel him to do that was my bet. To constrain him, by giving the change, to a movement... The exchange of letters, this coming and going, was already desire.

Pretty soon, you become lovers. But this book shows that it was wobbly from the start ...

In love, we give what we have and also what we do not have ... "to someone who does not want it," added Jacques Lacan. What was too much for Yann, for me was self-evident. Love makes it fragile, one falls from the height of its pride, suddenly deprived, and it can hurt. So we flee rather than expose ourselves to the risk of being transformed by the other. Yann was afraid, perhaps he too was fleeing from that love which surpassed him.

You were older than he, like Duras - with a larger gap in his case. How do you explain this attraction for its elders?

There was indeed at Yann's request for infinite tenderness, which came from childhood: "Love me! "It is a call to the mother for always being there. I may also have a maternal penchant. After all, publishers often wear their authors as mothers carry their children. And reciprocally: the authors nourish their editors with wonder. And in case of love ...

One day, he balances you: "I am fagot" , as if to make your story impossible?

No, not necessarily, rather not to be locked into a category. Yann loved men, but not only: he loved, outside codes. Gay sexuality is tainted with prejudices, a suffering, a "disease of death," as Marguerite Duras used to say. Perhaps he wanted to say he was in good health.

Your psychoanalyst was not in favor of telling this story ...

Psys try to ease trauma and avoid creating new ones. To make public the intimate passion reveals in me a will of narcissistic power that overrides the concern for the other. The little jubilation of being a writer among writers, on a bookstore, has a price. A devastating effect is not excluded.

Because you were married, with children?

The scandal does not lie in a free life, but in the immodesty of writing freely.

You say you waited till your children were grown up, but was it not Yann's death a year and a half ago that prompted you to publish this book?

The manuscript was in two copies, one at Yann's and the other at my house. In 2002, he already wanted a publication. I opposed it so as not to disturb my children or to annoy my husband. It was an obvious and secret love, he could have remained so. When Yann died in July 2014, my family situation had changed and I had the desire to make him this posthumous gift.

Was it not strange to succeed Duras in the heart of this man? Did not the ghost of the writer sometimes slip between you?

Yes of course. Marguerite Duras was present at all times - through her books, a number of which would not have come into existence without Yann's inspiring lover. It was a relationship to three, for the writings of Duras have inspired us formidably, it has sometimes been a passage, sometimes a barrage.

There is this scene where he announces that for you he has shaved the mustache, which he had been carrying since his 18 years.

This gesture meant a new freedom. He thus deprived himself of what was an obstacle to love, to kiss, to fusion. She had been a protection, and suddenly he did not need it anymore. He took the risk of engaging in a woman. Finally naked.

In the brief texts he gave you, it is almost always about time, which escapes and escapes us ...

Time was the only time he felt. His life, a slow undertaking of wasting time - walks, contemplation of others, bars ... He was thus formidably present in moments that escape immediately.

Why him, why you?

Suddenly the light, that's all. One can obviously dig, find what predisposes us to fall under the charm of one person and not another. But the miracle remains. When the event takes place, we should simply thank.

It's an extravagant love story, right?

A love story like any other, except that it was immediately inhabited by a third body: the work of Marguerite Duras.

Basically, did not you know that everything was lost beforehand, that Yann Andrea was too consumed to build something with you?

Of course everything was lost in advance! But what was possible and impossible at the same time was to take the dimension of the other, to grow inwardly, to share a look at what is open with someone like Yann, for whom life had withdrawn.

How was he in intimacy with you?

He was clumsy and very brutal. Often he would send me without reason: "Go away! Either he would leave in the middle of a meal, leaving me alone at the table. The need to be together was stronger than the desire to stay together. Sometimes I compared myself to a bird that bumps against a window, which bumps again and begins again.

What do you consider essential in this story?

The intensity of what we have lived, its presence in the minds of those who have had the privilege of knowing it, the sweetness of its voice, its laughter, its look ... Its malicious innocence. And, of course, the beauty of his texts.

(*) "The Story," ed. Pauvert.