Notre-Dame de Paris. The pocket theater celebrates the reopening of the cathedral with Sylvain Tesson

“And suddenly she falls. We will now live in front of the hole. And we start thinking. What is this era that claims to increase man without preserving his shrines? (…) Why are we not better conservatives? What does this collapse mean? »wrote Sylvain Tesson on April 15, 2019, the same night of the Notre-Dame fire, in a text course entitled “O queen of sorrow”. A text which appears in the series of readings scheduled until December 31 at the Théâtre de Poche Montparnasse (Paris).

Read alternately by the actors François Marthouret, Samuel Labarthe, Christophe Barbier and Claude Aufaure, the texts of Sylvain Tesson unfold in the heart of a chiaroscuro decor. In the small room located in the basement of the theater, the intimate atmosphere of these readings gives the spectator a unique impression: that of feeling initiated into the mysteries of Notre-Dame, by the light of the candles.

The first part of the show returns to the youth of the author who, with his accomplices, climbed the Lady of Stone. The second movement evokes the sacred place as a space of consolation and healing for the writer with a bruised body. “The stone ship was there, becalmed on the island. I only had to climb to the top of its towers to regain my strength,” he wrote in “Our Lady of Good Secours” in August 2015, following his own fall.

As for the last two parts of this show, they allow us to hear two other texts by the writer-adventurer: one sheds light on the rescue of the cathedral by the Paris firefighters, the other evokes the time of repair by the craftsmen called to the bedside of the building. Vibrant, these readings invite us to contemplation and joyful reunions with Our Lady.