This is one of the most touching shipment received this new school year.
The book, entitled “L’élegance de vos absences,” written and self-published by Gilles Mercier, is presented as follows.
For a long time, I lived under the motionless gaze of a few photographs modestly placed on my father’s desk. In these snapshots, my grandfather Pierre appeared like a secret hero, frozen in an aura of mystery, closer to a myth than a real man. I knew of him only the outlines of a fragmented legend: a soldier, a member of the Resistance, deported, then engulfed by Nazi fury, who died for France. His silences, like those of my family, had carved a strange void, an absence accepted without words, but never appeased. Pierre’s absence was mingled with the more insidious absence of my father Claude, caught up throughout his life in a quest for resilience, trapped in endless grief.
In 2012, after his death, I opened our family archives like a crypt. These were not just yellowed pages or forgotten faces, but fragments of my own DNA, bloody echoes that I carried without knowing it. I found my grandfather, Captain Roger Pierre Mercier, known as “Maxime,” snatched from life on September 2, 1944, in the Hartheim killing center. Alongside him, in my research, emerged the shadows and lights of my grandmother Fernande, her sister Madeleine, my eight-year-old aunt Michèle, and my father Claude, a five-year-old boy left facing an abyss.
When my father gave me, during his lifetime, his manuscript entitled “Maxime,” I didn’t know that it was a passing of the torch. I didn’t know that, with this gesture, he was entrusting me with the last thread connecting the living to the departed. This manuscript was his life’s work, the trace of a painful obsession: to find, stone by stone, the path of his own father. This legacy, as burning as it was invaluable, seemed to me like an unfinished repair that I had to take up in my turn.
To delve into these pages, to reread the letters, to contemplate the carefully recorded photographs, was to summon a silent assembly. I was getting to know those who had marked my lineage: a soldier, a child, a grieving woman, a wounded sister. I was rediscovering my aunt, I was understanding my grandmother, I was finally penetrating my father’s silence. Through them, I understood the anguish of waiting, the heartbreak, the weight of uncertainty that eats away at an entire life, the imagination of the intolerable—those prisons, those tortures, those nights without end.
.So I invoked them. I summoned my dead as one summons extinguished stars so that their light may still shine through the night. I seek not only the truth of the facts, but the reconciliation of souls. For only luminous memories, torn from the darkness, can offer survivors the strength to live without hatred, despite the hell they have been through.
This intimate quest is intertwined with collective history. I walked in my grandfather’s footsteps, from the mountains of the Puy de Dôme to the military prison of Clermont-Ferrand, from the camp of Compiègne to the wagon that rolled toward death. Each place is a scar, but also a standing witness. In their stones, in their gates, in their silence, I heard the muffled voices and the pulses of life that, against all odds, persisted in the heart of barbarism.
My work is a fragile bridge, stretched between several generations. It’s an attempt to free my family from its ghosts and offer them a symbolic meeting place, far from the absences that tore them apart. By recounting these shattered but never extinguished lives, I pay homage to what remains intact within us despite the storms: our intact humanity.
Gilles Mercier
Gilles Mercier : L’élegance de vos absences
Format 170mm x 230 mm / 120 pages / 380gr.
Façonnage manuel Gilles Mercier, Reliure suisse : Annabelle Gerin
www.gillesmercier.fr
@elegancedevosabsences.
