A Funeral and Four Seasons

Un Enterrement et quatre saisons (A Funeral and Four Seasons). Nathalie Prince. Flammarion, 2021

I started reading Nathalie Prince’s book, Un Enterrement et quatre saisons (A Funeral and Four Seasons), as a novel though there was no such indication on the cover or any other generic information for that matter. When I discovered the narrator’s name on page 27, I had to revise my assumption wondering why Nathalie Prince, a professor of literature at Le Mans University, and an author of fiction as well, opted for the autobiographical pact. Prince’s autobiographical text is actually a memoir which recounts the author’s struggle to come to terms with the premature death of her husband, Christophe Prince, a philosophy teacher and writer. In this year of intensive mourning and overflowing love, the author pays tribute to a beloved husband whose uncanny presence haunts the narrative. Though the mourning grazes melancholia, as the author alludes to in the last chapter, it is the love of life that predominates throughout the narrative. Defying death and oblivion the memoirist transforms her husband’s burial ground into a garden against all administrative odds and renders its cultivation into a rebellious and symbolic act.

Naturally, the cemetery garden is not the only one that Nathalie Prince cultivates. The garden of words is another one she cherishes with equal determination. The first instance of the value attached to them in the narrative dates back to the first encounter with Christophe Prince at the highly selective Ecole Normale Supérieure. Criticized for a presentation she gives as a student in this Institution, the memoirist after bravely defending her poem commentary, loses her composure and cries but draws the attention of her future life companion and wins the knight of her life.

Not that Nathalie Prince appears as a damsel in distress. The narrative builds up the figure of a combative woman who strives not only to preserve and honor her husband’s memory but also to keep any form of mediocrity and banality at bay. Endowed with a sharp eye for social malfunctioning, a penchant for black humor and caustic irony, a pride in intellectual achievements, the narrator navigates through this companionless world finding her bearings, “30 décembre 2017, premier jour du reste de ma vie/ December 30, 2017, first day of the rest of my life” (17). The composition of the chronicle of a death after-told has just started sealed by literature – “On est dans une histoire d’amour fantastique de Gautier, de Poe ou de Rodenbach/ We are in a fantastical love story by Gautier, de Poe ou de Rodenbach” (18) – an unsettling mourning picture, and intimations of immortality. Still, reminders of mortality seem to be running along the same lines as the first concern is Christophe Prince’s land of his own, a burial plot concession, “Mon amour, ce terrain est à nous. /My love, this land is ours.” (25). He is buried in early winter and in the cold months that follow, quotidian drabness in all its forms is fought against with wit. And in spring, the memoirist gets her “second wind” (116) as she discovers the benefits of running described not as an artificial paradise but as a natural one.

Nathalie Prince’s art of survival lies in fully assuming her work of mourning and highlighting what facilitates this task. “Le jardin permet de (…) faire son deuil/ The garden makes the work of mourning possible” (176), she says about her heterotopic cemetery garden for which she had to fight with the local townhall. The memoirist is not the sort of wife who will follow her husband on the pyre. Mother and educator of four children, owner of a château imprinted by a happy family life, literary keeper of the Humanities, she is intent on regaining a woman’s life but not at any price. If there is something that appears unforgivable to Nathalie Prince is mediocrity. The first encounter of a brief love affair as well as its end are ingeniously related through the transcription of a text message exchange that involves the selling of the memoirist’s car. Her experience of dating sites is finally rewarding as her conclusion suggests, “j’irai chercher, aussi loin qu’il faudra, mes émotions / I’ll seek as far as it takes, my emotions” (236). Nathalie Prince had lost her hearing for a while but could still listen to her body and respond to it.

Her four seasons in grief seem to have raised the question of who the author now is. No better image than the ship of Theseus that Prince introduces in her narrative to tackle it. In her universe of radical, disorienting change, her name remains, “Nathalie Prince. Je porte ton nom comme j’ai porté tes enfants, qui porte ton nom et qui te portent pour l’éternité / I bear your name as I bore your children, who bear your name and who bear you for eternity” (247). In this declaration of love, the reader may also see the reason why a memoir can appear more appropriate and comforting than a novel. There is no mediation in the flux of memory, and masks are superfluous, “Je ne suis pas un personage de roman / I’m no character in a novel” (261).

Contrary to Joyce Carol Oates, whose statement in A Widow’s Tale, “the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling,” is one of the three epigraphs in the book, Nathalie Prince assertively inhabits this tale of loss that ushered her “fifth season” (275). In the last chapter, Prince depicts a dangling woman whose account of her wanderings in a world devoid of her husband created this fifth season, the season of writing. She can clearly identify it, “Oui, c’est ça, j’en suis sûre maintenant, c’est quand j’ai voulu recueillir tout ce flux qui me sort de la peau, un peu comme quand je faisais trop de lait après la naissance d’Anselme et que je refilais en biberons pour d’autres bébés affamés / Yes, that’s it, I’m sure now, it’s when I wanted to collect all this flow that comes out of my skin, a bit like when I made too much milk after Anselme was born and I was passing it on in bottles to other hungry babies” (260). We can read in the metaphor other readers in grief.

Indeed, this apparently loosely but tightly structured text, which includes just like A Window’s Tale text messages, administrative letters or the transcription of phone conversations, enriches the literature of grief and mourning. In her own “year of magical thinking,” Nathalie Prince with “a paper and a pen as a companion” (261) targeted immortality.

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