Journalist and writer Madeleine Chapsal died on the night of Monday March 11 to Tuesday March 12 in Pouliguen (Loire-Atlantique), at the age of 98, her husband announced to Agence France-Presse.
She had closely witnessed, alongside her previous husband Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the launch of L’Express in 1953. She was a renowned literary critic there until the early 1970s, known among other things for memorable interviews with figures like Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Giono, Henry Miller and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
After her ouster from the magazine, she launched into writing: novels, stories, essays, books for young people, theater, poetry. In total, she has written around a hundred books. We owe him A Summer Without History, The House of Jade (700,000 copies sold), A Season of Leaves, Mother and Daughters, David (tribute to one of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s sons), What I Taught Françoise Dolto, and L’Inoubliée.
One of his best-known books is The Man of My Life (2004), an account of his story with Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, an often sad text, where the intimate mixes with the story and its protagonists, such as as François Mauriac, Pierre Mendès France and François Mitterrand. The writer has adapted several of her books for the cinema, such as The House of Jade (1988, by Nadine Trintignant), The Abandoned Woman (1992, by Edouard Molinaro) and The Inventory (1998, by Caroline Huppert).
Juror of the Femina Prize from 1981, she was brutally excluded in 2006 for having denounced the conditions for awarding the 2005 prize, too favorable, according to her, to Gallimard editions.
Born on September 1, 1925 in Paris, she was the daughter of an advisor to the Court of Auditors and the granddaughter of a former minister. His mother was a renowned seamstress. She met Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in 1942. Married in 1947, they divorced in 1960. She married again with Jean-Marc Vallet in Pouliguen in 2019, at the age of 93.
