The unspeakable, she said...

The writer Marguerite Duras died in Paris, on March 3, 1996. Throughout her life and to her dying breath, this astonishing woman never ceased to ascend the steps of national and international fame. Undoubtedly, she owed her success to her obstinacy to be and remain herself, come what may and at whatever cost to her own person.

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said: "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged."

Those are the opening lines of The Lover, the novel which, in 1984, brought Marguerite Duras not only the Goncourt, France's most famous literary award, but also a print run of almost three million copies, translations into some forty languages and an enormous world-wide success, magnified by the film subsequently directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Hers was, indeed, an astonishing face, as astonishing as her life story, from the young woman's sensual and disturbing elegance during the years between the wars to the sarcastic pout and reptilian gaze of the sacred contemporary monster, with provocative eyes glaring from behind her thick glasses.

"Between eighteen and twenty five," she wrote, "my face took off in a new direction. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one... And I've kept it ever since, the new face I had then. It has been my face. It's got older still, ofcourse, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed... It has kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste"...