The Odyssey of Marion Desjardins

Bench to bench in a small town

Jan 10, 2024

Holding on and letting go: Marion Desjardins in Granville. Photo: Martin Roche.

(Adapted from an article by Marie Carof-Gadel in Ouest-France.)

« À m’asseoir sur un banc, cinq minutes avec toi, et regarder les gens, tant qu’y en a », as French rocker Renaud sang. (Sitting on a bench five minutes with you, looking at people as everyone passes by.) It’s an exercise that novelist Marion Desjardins, a Granvillaise by adoption, has devoted herself to over the course of the last year, sitting on public benches in this Channel town. Sixty benches, and beside her each time, unknowns with whom she strikes up a conversation.

Her stationary journey began one morning in the plaza Saint-Paul where Marion was sitting when she struck up a conversation with a neighbor. That convinced her to discover her village, slowly, one bench after another, and make a book from the experience. It always begins in the same way. ‘I write on the benches here in Granville, mind if I sit next to you ?’ Often it was older persons. ‘They’re the ones who know how to take the time to look around. We no longer stop to watch the world go about its business.’

Desjardins regards this work as mix of documentary, street interviews and testimony. Normal for this former journalist who has already lived several lives.

‘At the age of ten, I began to write everything down in notebooks, family discussions and arguments. I burned all of it, which I regret but it made me realize what words leave behind as souvenirs, good and bad.’

At twenty, she flew the coop, became a journalist on a local newspaper in Paris, then got married in Quebec and became a mother before coming back with a book about her difficult separation, Les mouches noires (The Black Flies), published by Gallimard in 1987. Above all, Don’t tell Me Anything… and Portrait of an Absent Party followed. Drawing on her difficult break with Gallimard, she wrote Lettre à mon éditeur as a way of understanding what had happened, and took off.

Now she publishes her work herself. ‘I just wanted to keep these stories alive.’ Small victories, born of patience, have followed: ‘Anna Carrière editions has just spotlighted my novel An Accident, which will be out in 2024. Miracles still happen.’

The Intelligence of Direct Contact

She settled in Granville, where this restless person found a home port and now only reluctantly leaves her cocoon, a house on the heights of quartier Saint-Paul. Her nest in the wind. On the benches, she keeps busy filling the clean white pages.

‘I was nervous at first, I felt under pressure.’ It was enough to let the fleeting happen. ‘I remember a woman on a bench, rue Amiral-Hugon. Very sweet, very pretty. She’d just moved to Granville with her mother. We shared our memories of childhood.’

In Granville, there are benches made of sand, and during Carnival, chariot benches. And everywhere there are ‘strange’ benches, ‘abandoned’ benches, orphan benches, ones that seem out of place, others that seem to belong to the life of the neighborhood, ones people are happy City Hall put there.

Have we forgotten the function of the public bench, a market of free time, a place to do everything and nothing ? ‘There are beautiful benches, the ones that stand out, facing the sea. Granville’s beauty rescues people, like the three women who, after their divorces, met up at their bench at Roc Point. I’m sure that if there were more benches, there would be more conversations.’

Thanks for visiting. Pass it on.

On a bench, the intimate emerges the same as on a couch. ‘One day, I chose the bench in the square near Saint-Nicholas church. I started a conversation with a 90 year-old woman, and we became friends. When another woman joined us and entered the conversation I was afraid the charm of it might be spoiled.’

‘This woman told her story in an astonishing manner : she has a lover, a married man. She’s 70, she still wants to live. She confessed she cries at night when she feels alone. Our other companion didn’t judge her in the least. The discussion between perfect strangers reveals the intelligence of direct human contact. You know you’ll never see each other again, the whole thing is fleeting. I don’t strike up friendships there.

Desjardins sometimes hits a snag. “Disagreeable types tell me I ask too many questions. To undermine a conversation with someone is to unleash a wave, to hit a wall.’ And then the trap of asking too many questions and forgetting to talk about oneself. ‘Taking without giving, you have to know how to be open.’

Her estimation of the experience ? Marion Desjardins would like to see more public benches. ‘It’s indispensible for living together. It’s where people meet. We don’t have the culture of the public bench like in England, where people put up a plaque to recall the memory of someone who liked to sit there or to celebrate an amorous encounter…’

I came loping down the hill, looking for an open restaurant on the main drag of Mont-St-Michel. Early January and many of them were closed, the open ones packed. Rain any minute. I grabbed a table at the first one and snatched the day’s paper off the bar, Ouest-France, with the article by Marie Carof-Gadel, lightly edited here for English-language consumption. (Photog Martin Roche can be found on twitter, flickr, instagram, linked-in.)

I’m interested in people who get knocked around by the system but land on their feet. Desjardins sits and talks to strangers, in public, no phones or later connections involved or implied. We’re busy, on call day and night but we never escape the crushing burden of our loneliness. Desjardins turns herself into a physical version of the poetic principle, the old idea of urban performance art but in a small seaside town. What was confrontational in America is conversational in France.

You can find her at https://www.marion-desjardins.com/

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