Michèle Bernard - Rêves inachevés (Poémes de Sabine Sicaud) (2022)

Michèle Bernard once sang a poem by Sabine Sicaud. It was in 2006, among other texts. A sentimental Education of which we could not read the last pages, and, to write a song, she said: "I take the whole of life, I cut it into pieces / Love, anger and the little birds / It's everything I like, in concentrate, / The music and the tangled words / Which fly away”. Sabine Sicaud's poem was Days of Fever: "What do I want? A carafe of ice water. She takes it up here, among other poems by this young girl, who died at the age of 15, after terrible suffering in a house called "Solitude". These are just a few texts chosen from two works that can be read on the internet and that can now be heard on the two CDs produced by Patrick Campistron, texts accompanied by pieces interpreted on the piano by João Paulo Santos.

Composers (Antonio Fragoso, Gabriel Dupont, Guillaume Lekeu, Lili Boulanger) and poet, they lived at the same time, at the very beginning of the 20th century, and they died young, from illnesses for which we did not yet know how to cure those who were affected. Their fairly brief time on earth, they marked it by creating works that we can still read or listen to today. They are therefore not early works; they are the works of a lifetime.

Michèle Bernard lends her voice to Sabine's poems where she evokes paths "dug with ruts", where she wonders if peace sleeps, "old Corot, in the golden mists? / In yours, color of lavender, / Sweet Puvis de Chavannes? in yours, / Painter of gray Dreams, mysterious Career? / Where does it blossom, Henri Martin, in your light? », she who was born on the eve of the 1914-1918 war. At fourteen, she hurts herself and begins a year of suffering that her words will track down: “this pain that makes you alone in the world (…) This pain, my God, this pain that kills…” Yet she seizes the spring making her forgetting, for a moment, the pain, and hoping to see one day, “when I am cured (…) Landscapes that are always renewed (…) I need sorbets and frozen liqueurs, / Crunchy fruits, sweet grapes , fresh almonds. / Maybe ambrosia… / Or just bite into the fresh heart of a peach”. Then returns this song interpreted by Michèle Bernard: “this water, in my thought, / Runs gently like a fountain. / She's white, she's blue because she's so fresh. / It comes from the spring or from a full jug. / She has that hazy silver that coats the peaches / And the sparkle of a faceted crystal”.

We must thank Patrick Campistron for having been able to hear these words, Michèle Bernard for having said and recorded the astonishing texts of Sabine Sicaud, and the mother of this young girl who never gave up hope of publishing her daughter's poems, what she will achieve thirty years after her death, a year before her own death, at Éditions Stock, in 1958. Thanks to them, these words, these poems will not disappear.