madness of Tess

The young woman finishes drinking the biblical words of the priest. The walls of the church are cold. This sacred place is quiet. We hear the breathing of a few tens of people who finish their prayers. Elysabeth gets up and her slow step echoes on the floor. Her long black dress slips and brings with it some grains of dust. Elizabeth Du Tonquin would make a perfect nun. It's all in his step, the head lowered, lips and smile closed. She's convinced that in the last hour she gave herself to God and the Holy Spirit. She's still moving forward to the feet of the priest, until that her austere dress meets the folds of the sixty-year-old's cassock. In front of the gaze of the other faithful, she bends her knee in front of the man of the Church. She places a kiss at his feet. Elizabeth slowly gets up and kisses warmer still the crucifix. If there are many ardent kisses that she knows how to give, it is these... She takes Jesus between his lips, at each times, at every Mass... And the faithful like that, his father in the front row, likes that. Her pale red hair is held tight to her scalp with a gold clip. But there are always two locks that come to find refuge along her plump cheeks. Elysabeth is twenty-five but she still has that child's face, that doll's face... His grizzled father, further on, in his marriageable suit, nods his head... He too still has some red highlights... Luc Du Tonquin, the wealthy Secretary of State at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He likes to see his daughter like that, in front of his friends who are just as rich as him. it is living proof that purity still exists. For twenty-five years, Monsieur Du Tonquin has been fighting for preserve his daughter from the filth and turpitude of society... He who is drowning in euros, he is this high official who only sees people of her rank... Her daughter only sees Jesus and his books and that's very good. He tells himself that one day his daughter will be like him... Faithful to Christ and embracing a prolific career in high administration and why not in politics. He dreams that one day she will take the reins of the French Catholic party... He secretly dreams that it will bring about a return of the monarchy... He doesn't smile, he just admires his work. His daughter will always walk in his footsteps... It could never be otherwise. This morning, there reigns in this church, reserved only for wealthy people of high society, an almost suffocating and medieval atmosphere. It's true! Elysabeth looks like a poor woman of the 1800s, she looks like the heroine of a book by Zola... And yet she is not fictitious... The year 2023 is coming to an end... And Elysabeth is as hollow as an empty wine barrel. *** The room is rather dark. The long table almost crosses the huge room. Elysabeth stands in the center. His father is at the end, his mother is installed at the other end. The silence is the same than the one reigning in a church and in lifeless places. The maids finish their comings and goings to pose the exquisite and oversized dishes on the table. They withdraw from the room bowing out. Luc Du Tonquin invites his wife and daughter to bless this meal at length. Elysabeth bows her head, and whispers her love to Christ... Here apart for pray we do not talk at the table. In fact, in this family, we rarely speak. Yet there is an empty place beside Elysabeth. This is the place of her little sister Eve, this rebel who preferred to flee this family too backward for her. The only landmarks of the young redhead are his mother Veronica. The only landmarks of the young redhead are her mother Veronica, a former Italian TV presenter who slammed everything back 26 years to devote herself to her husband, to his endless travels to the four corners of the world, to dedicate themselves to this religious life imposed by this always absent father. The noises of cutlery brought to these too often closed lips have the same sonority as a requiem. These long silent meals, Elysabeth has always known only that. When not shared with his father and his mother, there is then a horde of individuals of the same caliber as her father, high placed in the ministries, sometimes even ministers, clerks, big bosses... This young woman with the air of a sick child, with this thick red hair with a thousand chestnut reflections, whose face is strewn with all small, very pale freckles, especially on his rather small and rather wide nose, spent his childhood, not in a convent but almost. She received her education by priests and nuns as nannies. Her father bet everything on her when he realized that Eve Du Tonquin was the irrecoverable child, the child of the devil, in his own words. Do the French know that they are ruled by this austere aristocracy? By this rather tall man with a well-pronounced musculature who early on forbade her pampered daughter Elysabeth from dating men, describing them as animals. And Elysabeth has always been extremely gentle...this child who contradicts nothing, who obeys and who has a terrifying fear of everything. No, the French don't know... That a young woman of innocent beauty doesn't associate with the lower classes. That she frequented for a long time only her parents, following between three religious-sounding courses his father in worldwide. His education was very strict. She is fluent in English and Italian. She knows the Bible by heart... Her room is flowered by the Virgin Mary and by portraits of Jesus, doubtless the only man in her life.... Her father told her, that only Jesus is reliable and that one day Jesus would find her a pure man... that she will have to listen to the signs that Jesus would send her to this that moment... Basically, that she listen to her father... Although her father was absent, very early on she banished everything that touched directly or indirectly on affect. At the Du Tonquins, we don't hug each other, we don't say I love you, it's reserved for the almighty. At the Du Tonquins, a only concern comes after God is success. Luc Du Tonquin instilled success in the eldest of the daughters... You have to wear yourself out with the task... You have to think big like the almighty and yet since the birth of Elysabeth, he relentlessly held blinders firmly and firmly over his daughter's blue eyes. Failing to open up to the world and its pleasures, Elysabeth quickly fell in love with her studies... Studies imposed by her father. You will do career like me my daughter.... So you, Elysabeth, that tasteless computer memory, you'll chain the years to the Sorbonne, you'll end valedictorian in political science... But you, your father wants you to dust off the benches of the ENA or the benches of the ENM... Just that... Normally, a child chooses his path according to his passions, his atoms hooked with the world. At the Du Tonquins, we don't choose. Eve paid for it lately.. because this pretty dark head (like her mother) has always wanted to be an actress...and a dancer in her spare time... don't tread the boards and we don't dance in this family. It happened, the year after narrowly graduating from high school, Eve patiently waited for the return of her father... With hair dyed between red and purple. He almost had a heart attack and shouted at the blasphemy! Elysabeth hid her eyes, she was also shocked by her sister's quickdraw... Eve spat out her venom. She freed herself from all this charade. I'm leaving with my theater group, no, I won't go to science No I will not go to science Politics. No, daddy, you won't choose for me... The little brunette had already packed her bags and her boyfriend was waiting for her downstairs. His mother screamed, cried for two weeks...non stop. Looks like she had just lost her child. Luc Du Tonquin suffered this setback as one removes a stain from a furniture. It was necessary to erase at all costs this story... So Veronica and Elysabeth were forbidden to pronounce the first name of the youngest. Yet Elysabeth is more than anything attached to her little sister although everything separates them. One is small and dark like her mother, the other rather tall and redheaded like her father. Eve has always been fickle, unstable, rebellious, dynamic, her tongue always hanging out, her eyes always clinging to the torsos of handsome boys... difficulties at school... Elysabeth is quite the opposite. Sometimes it's hard to believe that a sound can come out of this mouth. One learned to think for herself, the other only thinks through her father. This is how the eldest became a relentless at work, at studies, sickly and sickly shy, with incredible modesty. Some will say that it is stuck and they will be right! Elysabeth is cut off from the world, isolated, she only knows the world through his father's eyes. She doesn't really have any passion apart from the cult she devotes to her faith and apart from the piano which she plays divinely well. His years of study could have been unbearable with a character like his... When he finally had to meet other people, other people of his age. She could have split this shell, quenched her curiosity... She could have interacted with the others. She was nothing. She was satisfied with the bare minimum in terms of sociability... Beneath her frail and sheepish appearance, Elysabeth always appears haughty...and so cold...so uninteresting... This young woman is a UFO, totally out of step with the times... Damn is that normal to never watch television? To learn only through information sorted on the job by his father's assistants? Moreover, during all these years, even distant, even absent, he had her watched, that is to say the hours at which she returned, who she frequented?(the desert?). But what a boring life! She could have found refuge with her mother... She could have created a bond with this woman who will one day have known all these unacknowledged pleasures... But these two women are so different... The only thing that brings them together is the growing fear they feel towards by Luc Du Tonquin. Damn, but what a world of illusions does she live in! She has seen her sister become a fulfilled woman. She has already seen her sister come home drunk, tell her about her s****l encounters with people whom Elysabeth judges as not frequentable. It could have made him want to read these many mischievous smiles on this other doll's face... But there again, such a father such a girl ... So yes Elysabeth is incredibly beautiful, without artifice in this superficial world in which she lives, yes it seems pure, almost cute but like her father, she has easy and confusing judgment. it is exactly the same when a somebody who knows anything about mechanic comes to tell another how to repair the engine of his car... Twenty-five years old and still a virgin. At the same time everything related to sexuality disgusts her. She doesn't know not even his own body! Her father, wanting too much to fashion his favorite daughter, wanting too much to protect her, locked her up in a kind of golden prison... It's not a prison but convent. It almost feels like a book, it seems so completely unimaginable... ***