Used book – Dame suisse sur un canapé de reps vert, Catherine Paysan

Sitting in the evening, after long walks through the Jura, on the sofa of a romantic Swiss guesthouse where she spends the summer, born in Neuchâtel to a Calvinist Swiss father and a Catholic French mother, married to a Bernese chemical engineer then to a farmer from Lower Normandy, widowed twice after their violent deaths, still beautiful as she approaches fifty, beneath the mask of composure that she has, since childhood, imposed upon herself to offer to others, if not to herself, what does Marguerite Droz conceal? And what has this sensitive soul come to seek here, in these places conducive to meditation? This feverish dreamer, this suppressed passionate woman, who has never ceased, beyond avowable joys and sorrows, to cultivate so many secret, unusual loves (for a statue, a passing Nazi policeman, a young Jew from La Chaux-de-Fonds, an Alemannic cavalry officer) and who could help her finally distance herself from herself, to find peace? "I would like to highlight the beauty of Catherine Paysan's style (...). This novel is an admirable lesson in wisdom and sensuality." Patrick Grainville, V.S.D.