Losing a father at the age of 6 is hard to bear. However, this is the drama experienced by Violette, the last daughter of Inès de la Fressange’s marriage to Luigi d’Urso. The latter died on March 23, 2006 at the age of 55, carried away by a heart attack in his Parisian apartment. Inès de la Fressange then plunges into a long and painful mourning, in which she must remain strong for her daughters. The secrets of the father, she will never reveal them. However, it is not without difficulty to find out for Violette, fascinated and looking for answers to all the questions she asks herself about this father she barely knew.
Nearly seventeen years later, Violette remembers the loss of her father who plunged her into writing a book. “Losing a parent is a special grieving experienceshe admits in the pages of Sunday newspaper. We are destroyed the moment we build ourselvesBut in order to get to know her father better, the young woman soon realized that she could only count on herself. So she spent a long time exploring with relatives, more or less close, and achieved her goal. as she announces it in the pages of her book Even the noise of the night has changedpublished by Flammarion on March 22.
Only the image of her father remained in Violette’s mind as a hero, a proud and great statue. The illusion is shattered as his discoveries progress:Violette d’Urso discovers the shadow in the light. His father: drug addiction and heroin addiction; alcoholism, proximity to far-left movements (…); the death by overdose of a young woman who was immediately left in a storage room.“The violence of the story amazingly allowed her to move forward and build herself as a woman. She doesn’t blame her mother for hiding that whole part from her:”To mourn my father, I needed to know who he was, but I also realized that I learned my family secrets at the age when I was supposed to learn them. Today I can say: My mother saved me and she was right to do so..”
I wasn’t Mother Courage at all
Dealing with grief is an ordeal in itself, even more difficult when it comes to children. Inès de la Fressange recalled this during an interview with match in Parisrevealing not to have”Mother Courage” for Nine and Violette. It’s also thanks to them and “their extraordinary vitality“that she managed to get up:”I’m not superhuman. I’ve been through this grieving, I’ve been through it all. I was not in the joy, nor in the success, nor in the positive. Destroyed. (…) I forced myself. I remember we did the nightclub minute at 6: The music was loud, like Elvis, Twist Again, and the three of us were dancing. The girls loved it.”
Thanks to all this love and their presence, Inès de la Fressange was also able to rebuild herself. Three years later she also found love again with Denis Olivennes, co-manager of EditionDoing “unthinkable“for her initially:”He treats my children as his own. He helps them with their studies. He loves them. He says that a stepfather has only duties, not rights. He is benevolent, peaceful. […] And he treats me like a princessAll that Luigi d’Urso’s wives deserved after such a tragedy.