Gilles Lucas

As if viewed through the gridded frames of wire that the artists use to divide their field of vision into small windows, Judith Salomé's story is scattered in fragments. It is not a structured, efficient narrative punctuated by unexpected twists and turns. The plot that serves as a framework for our work is extremely simple. I have no doubt that, under a skilful and practiced pen, it would have lent itself to the most interesting and even the most dramatic developments; but I do not know the art of suspense very well. One must therefore look in this story for neither intrigues calculated with foresight, nor situations arranged with art, nor complications of events, in a word, nothing of what is commonly used to excite, sustain and suspend interest. The arrangement of the facts, their succession in time, is, certainly, not arbitrary in our story; it makes the action progress, we will observe. But one could also say that these same facts have little importance in themselves and that they interest us only insofar as they lead our heroine to meet other characters and to weave relationships with them. It is above all the complexity of the relationships between the different protagonists, their cruelty at times, that makes this work interesting, beyond a simple plot or another. My first goal was to chronicle an ambitious young girl who leads, until her final repentance, an incessant struggle to practice her art in this 17th century France, both wild and refined. Written in the first person, the story is like a fictional biography that follows, as a simple chronicle, the strict order of the chronology of events (the King's Grand Carousel, the construction of the Palace of Versailles, the persecution of Protestants). If Judith's story obeys the proven principle of apocryphal memoirs, it is because the scope of the project, while maintaining the subjectivity of our heroine from a novelistic point of view, allows for a general reflection on the world she lives through. Numerous themes, indeed, appear in filigree of the story. The almost total absence of dramatic effect must remove, at the same time, any vain decorative aspect, this plague which, in our eyes, contaminates so many historical films (especially with big budgets). As a result, everything in the script has to sound very accurate, and on this point we are thinking of the dialogues, in particular, which at certain moments (signing of contracts, apprenticeship and marriage) have a deliberately documentary aspect. The style of the dialogues, punctuated by the voice-over, is that of the beautiful language of the XVII century: - simplicity, clarity, breadth. She does not fear what she says, does not run away from what she writes. She says without fever, but with strength and ferocity, ambition and success, vanity and success, love and sorrow, illness and death. ...



Born in 1966

Quimper France

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JUDITH SALOME

1. THE VOCATION But who is this Judith Salomé? Her story begins in Paris, in the Pont Notre Dame district, on May 15, 1643, when she was baptized. She was the daughter of a portrait and still-life painter named Jacques. From an early age, she showed a marked artistic predisposition. Her father, a member of the brotherhood of Saint Germain des Prés, where artists from the old Netherlands were numerous, taught her a few rudiments, and then, perhaps, the still-life painter and art dealer Pieter van Meyel, whom Judith's mother Marie Granier married for the second time. 2. THE WORKSHOP Judith was a prolific artist from an early age, whose output, perhaps thanks to her stepfather's trade, was appreciated, since we know that Charles I of England acquired five of her works. The majority of her signed paintings date from the period 1662-1675, which appears to have been her most productive, although her activity continued until at least 1685. In 1665, she opened her studio to other women wishing to study painting. This was quite exceptional at the time. It is said that many men visited her studio to admire Judith's legendary beauty with their own eyes. In 1673, this sustained and successful activity led to her appointment as ordinary painter to the king, a position that ensured her a certain financial ease. 3. THE DESTINY In 1678, Judith married Protestant art dealer Philippe Talmière de Sancy, with whom she had two children. But dark days lay ahead for the followers of the "so-called reformed religion", as it was known at the time. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, leaving them no choice but between conversion and exile. In 1686, Louise's husband was imprisoned, and one of her children was forced to recant, while the other two fled to London. Judith Salomé, who had reached the age of 42 after her husband's death, encountered serious financial difficulties. She had to convert to Catholicism to escape the persecution of Protestants and to avoid having her remaining property confiscated.

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