Madeleine Chapsal: her love affair with TV

Madeleine Chapsal has had several lives but love has only truly been present in the heart of one of them: the one where, for civil status, she became “Madame Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber ". Half a century later, in 2004, in a book entitled The Man of My Life, she recounted her moments of happiness, but also the sky that fell on her head when she discovered the existence of a affair between her husband and Françoise Giroud. Perfectly at ease in front of the cameras, she did not shy away from Thierry Ardisson's questions and Laurent Baffie's remarks in Tout le monde enloque, when she had to promote this story.

A sequence that Madelen invites you to discover or rediscover, chosen among many others. More than 500 long appearances by Madeleine Chapsal are in fact listed in the INA archives. Each of them is linked to the release of a romance novel or an essay inspired by one's feelings of the moment, such as love disappointment, loneliness, jealousy or the evolution of the body of the woman according to age.

Each time, she does not hesitate to morally and sincerely expose herself in front of the cameras. Well before the birth of reality TV and shows where we evoke in detail our slightest moods, she managed to reach a large female audience. The impact on the sales of his books was considerable, particularly at trade fairs where the queues at his stand were endless because people had seen him on TV. They became even longer in 2006 when she was excluded from the jury of the Prix Femina for having denounced in her Journal d'hier et d'avenir, certain arrangements, on the eve of the vote, between publishers and some of her sisters.

His integrity and resolutely free speech have borne fruit. Morally boosted by this success, she published around a hundred novels and essays. Unable not to spend four hours every morning in front of his computer, in the office of his house on the Île de Ré, he wrote four to six books per year, each time selling nearly 50,000 copies. exemplary. If she blackened her first pages the day after she turned 15, it was only at 48, that is to say almost halfway through her life, that she entered literature with A Summer Without History. She thus put an end to a career as a “culture” journalist which she mainly carried out at L’Express.

That Françoise Giroud became her husband's mistress did not prevent her from creating bonds of friendship with the co-founder of the weekly. The latter taught him the secrets of writing before entrusting him with major interviews with famous writers, carried out in their homes. It was a first in the history of the press. A few years later, she collected all of her conversations into what became her first book The Writers in Person.

On May 11, 1960, it earned him his baptism on the small screen in Lectures pour tous, through a long interview with Pierre Desgraupes. In this show, she spoke of her meeting with François Mauriac in a large bourgeois apartment, and her tête-à-tête with Jean-Paul Sartre in a tiny office. Alberto Moravia, whose first gesture in the morning is to rush to his typewriter and Van Dongen, who told him nonsense before offering him candy, were also part of his hunting list. At the dawn of the 1960s, she predicted a great career for a writer she was the first to confess: Jean-Marie le Clézio. She finally specifies that she has taken shorthand lessons in order to accurately note the confidences of her interlocutors. Words that she says with a shy smile and a voice that is not yet truly confident. No one can imagine, starting with her, that she will become a TV beast.