Monique Saint-Hélier. Star-shaped writing

“Hundreds of polyphonic chords that unite, separate, tame or reject the thoughts or hearts of all the characters, some of whom are dead, others alive – many of whom will never even meet, or else, in the secret of thoughts, where we set our most ardent appointments.”

This is how novelist Monique Saint-Hélier describes her work to her publisher Grasset. Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1895, she spent her writing life in Paris and died at the age of 60, leaving an unfinished body of work with complex ramifications.
This exhibition showcases her writing through the manuscripts of the work and her Diary kept during the Second World War. Bedridden by illness from an early age, with Rilke, Proust and Virginia Woolf as her models, she invented a universe, the Alérac cycle, that enabled her to access that “warm, living life” of which she was deprived.

Reading by Fiamma Camesi, actress

Curators: Stéphane Pétermann & Alexandra Weber Berney

Exhibition from November 7, 2024 to April 19, 2025

Due to works on the Place de la Riponne, access to the Palais de Rumine has been modified. A map of the new access points is available on the City of Lausanne website.