Biography

Born in Pau in 1968, William of Fonclare grew up near Aix-en-Provence. Since 2006 he is Director of the Museum of the Great War in Peronne (Somme).

"Dans ma peau is a text which has its roots in the first twentieth century, the days when men wore mustaches and women large hats,when cars backfiring on major boulevards frighten horses. In the violence of a raging war so new, a world was crashed and all that is left for us are a few echoes of distorted and flickering images that we no longer understand. This war, I know it well: I am director of the Museum of the Great War in Peronne in the Somme, in the heart of the battlefields of the First World War, where British Commonwealth troops opposed the Germans from 1914 to 1918. And it is with my body I feel the harshness of the old reality of combat, for four years, I suffer from a disease that has no name and makes my every movement painful and difficult, so well that I know no more a time of peace and rest. Sometimes I feel so close to those I witness that I share suffering with these men who are no longer, my horizon is constantly pushed to inner explosions. I work with objects, immaculate uniforms kept in the reserves of the Historial, guns like watches, daggers like boots, all these resound of violence that I think I feel them all the time. That's what I am trying to say and write, and the attention that I pay would be different if it was not the result of my experience at the Historial, if it was not first born from an empathy for those suffering more than I." (Message from the author)

My body is a straitjacket, I am trapped in a matrix of flesh and bone. I struggle to walk, to talk, to write, to move the muscles that pain me at every moment. My mind rehashing the same old tunes, I can not see the smiles of my children, nor the tender eyes of the one I love, I see that my hands are shaking, my arms struggling to bring food to my mouth and my legs buckle under the weight of a body grown too heavy. I'm just a badly seated man who dreams endlessly, and if Ionce loved this body, I hate it now. We live together now and it has the final word in everything, I am not resolved to this constrained idea.

"How do we recognize that a book is beautiful? Beautiful, not only good, not necessarily great.at his music,at first, no doubt. The little music of words that ring true, the steps that harmonize, things said, simply without effects. its truth, then. That of the characters in the case of a novel. That of the experience lived when it comes to a life story, or only one of its slices. Its humor, finally, or rather the care taken to spare the spirit of seriousness, the distance taken with pathos, for restraint in misfortune, the silence of great pain to the politeness of despair, in short. Dans ma peau Guillaume de Fonclare resembles all these attributes." (Mark Riglet, Lire, April 2010)