“Praying has become for me a question of balance”

In the first pages of your book, you evoke the importance of feeling beautiful to feel loved and love others.

Has it always sounded obvious to you?

It was by becoming Miss Côte d’Ivoire that I started to love myself a little bit. To gain confidence in me. This confidence stabilized when I met Yves Saint Laurent. I became a fighter, I had the niac. Feeling beautiful, loved, it gives insurance. I have always felt that a little flame in me guided me or was my guardian angel.

You were born into a very poor family …

My paternal grandmother had a very difficult life. She has experienced several false strata, lost young children. My father is the only one who survived. She had prayed to Jesus to have this child.

Your parents were very believing. What did they transmit to you?

My mother practiced voodoo a little because she was influenced by my paternal grandmother whose brother was a very big witchle. He directed voodoo ceremonies. People were going to consult him to find out if he was going to rain, if such marriage would work … but my mother deprived us of food if we were not going to the church.

My father was a fervent believer, he went to mass every Sunday. He took a picture of us on our return, in our most beautiful Sunday dresses. When he died, when I was only 3 years old, my mother took over on the religious level.

But since she did not have enough money to feed the whole family, I was entrusted to an uncle who lived in Togo. Then, at 5 years old, they sent me to Gabon with another uncle . There, I learned to return the currency to the family trade. If I was wrong, I was slapped.

At 20, your victory in the Miss Côte d’Ivoire competition opens the way to Parisian life, the dream of a young model. What memory do you have of your first meeting with Yves Saint Laurent?

At that time, I was already a model for ready-to-wear at Glamor, one of the largest agencies in Paris at the time. I absolutely wanted him to meet me. There was so much competition during the castings … I was very nervous. A lady dressed us. I passed the first selection.

The lady in question knew exactly what the master wanted, upstairs, in her “studio”, the temple of beauty. I went up, I saw him very surrounded, behind his desk, in the middle of a cloud of assistants. He gave me a big smile and suddenly my stress flew. He made me do several fittings and it was gone: I became his muse. He found his inspiration in me. A relationship of complicity has settled.

You write that he had a spiritual dimension. Who did he stand from?

From his mother who often came to see him and attended the parades. It was the first person he started to dress, when he was still young, in Algeria. It was his first model. Maybe he saw his mother in me. He had a great sweetness in him, a placed side, as is very often spiritual. He knew how to give love.

Very young, you had raped.

Did this love help you give you your dignity?

Yes, by clothing which has something to do with God’s grace for me. This contributes to our harmony, to sensuality between beings. With respect. Because for me, admiration, attraction must go with respect.

This environment is crossed by many temptations: easy money, drugs, sex … Is it possible not to burn your wings?

Some models get there because they have their families behind them. It was not my case. My family was my modeling agency that celebrated without limits. If you were not warned, warning, it is so easy to succumb to temptation. In the 1990s, I led a life of debauchery.

In the evening, when I returned, I didn’t feel good and I was crying. The question tarauded me: why did I cry, and not the others? I see the mystery of the Holy Spirit. I know today that having lived this life of sin made me plunge into the depths of faith. Praying has become for me a question of balance.

Then there was disgrace with Yves Saint Laurent, the betrayal of your best friend … What did these tests taught?

One day, I decided to change my hairstyle. Monsieur Saint Laurent loved me styled at the boy and I had the misfortune to make weaving (African hairdressing technique, editor’s note). Seeing me, he made big eyes and I understood that it was a crime of lese majesty (laughs). I laugh today but, that day, I was petrified. At the time, he didn’t say anything. The following season, I was not selected to parade.

But the hardest part was the betrayal of my best friend, Katoucha, whom I considered my sister. I brought her into the house and she took my place with the big designer, then ignored me. One day, in front of the Blessed Sacrament, I melted in tears like a Madeleine by releasing my rage against her. And, by prayer, I was able to forgive him. It also allowed me to understand that she had acted in this way because she too had been the victim of great violence in her flesh: child, she had been excised.

How did your return to faith go?

A little before the year 2000, my cousin offered to take me to discover the churches of Paris. We left early, sometimes visits three different places of worship in the morning, assisting mass every day. We called this our “pilgrimage”. One of my model friends, Stéphane, also helped me on this path, when he wanted to deepen his faith and become a priest.

He entered a monastic community for some time. I realized that during all these years, I had become narcissistic and megalomaniac. When you are tempted by pride, you think you are enough for yourself, you no longer need God and you forget it. The betrayal of Katoucha, jealousy, disgrace, debauchery … It is by the way that I was able to be reborn to faith.

What has changed in your life?

Place of forgiveness. If my mother did not give me all the love that I would have liked to receive, I did not too have to forgive her: this is understandable because she lived in misery. But I was able to forgive Katoucha and also forgive myself to have been a bad mother, an absent mother. I am convinced that God is love, that he forgives everyone and that he does not like that one judges. As Christ bought us by his blood shed on the cross, I evoke his blood to help me forgive.

What message of hope would you like to transmit to those who do not have your faith?

We are all children of God. I would like everyone to know that God exists, loves and waiting for them. We are inhabited by light. We have to turn to her in order to be lit. As Saint John says, “the one who makes the truth comes in the light” (Jn 3:21).