The mystery of both Madeleine

Le Monde CORRESPONDING NANCY

After finding the French version of this story, through Google, I decided to use their translate function and this is what it came up with ....


Assise with the dining-room table his/her Aïcha girl, on the last floor of a HLM of Vittel with unspoilable view on the gendarmerie, the octogenarian in démord not: “The true Madeleine, it is me!” Madeleine Morès, born on November 6, 1924 with Tellancourt (Meurthe-et-Moselle), it is it. The other, “the Madeleine of Saint-Etienne”, is, according to it, only one usurping which lives under its name and touches its pension of 514 euros monthly since more than twenty years.

To a few hundred kilometers of the Vosges, the other Madeleine, that of Saint-Etienne, lose of it the sleep and to eat it. “It is quite sad to finish at 80 years with a history like that on the back, sighs it. Me I am called Madeleine Morès. When I came in the world, it is the name which one gave me. It is not me which chose it.” Friday September 1, Madeleine of Saint-Etienne will consult a lawyer, because it is necessary well to be defended. All that exceeds it a little. It discovered that its business was médiatisée when its baker showed him the newspaper! Not easy to prove that one is well that which one claims to be. Especially when one is a small old woman rams modest.

This médiatico-legal swirl tires a little Madeleine of Vittel and saddens it. She is, with this other octogenarian inhabitant of Saint-Etienne, in the middle of a enigma which started in February 2004, when Madeleine of Vittel east gone to the town hall to be made remake an indentity card. She returned from Algeria, where she had thirty-seven past years after having married, in 1959, Amar Fieras, from which she separated a few years ago. “I wanted to make change my address. I fell by ground when it was said to me that there was a Madeleine Morès who had renewed her indentity card in 2001.” The Madeleine in question had been born with the same date as it, at the same place, in the high country, of the same mother and the same father… except that it was not it.

In Vittel, Madeleine spreads out over the table her passport, her family record book and a small monochrome photo at the notched edges where two girls pose, sitted in grass. This photograph, it is his/her brother who transmitted it to him when the business burst. She dates from the time when Madeleine was in the sisters, in Orleans, in a boarding school for girls. She is approximately 20 years old. Madeleine of Vittel, it is the girl on the right on the photograph. “The other, it is that which is on the left.” They seem to be friends. “I do not remember it. I do not know who it is. It is so far.”

It excavates its memory to find traces of the past, evidence of its identity. It seeks explanations: “Is this a revenge? Does it hide somebody?” Madeleine goes up the course of time. Its very first years, it passed them to Tellancourt. “My mother died when I was 7 years old by giving rise to my third brother. It was in 1931. My father had given up us.” The five children of the Morès phratry only find themselves and are placed at the public Assistance. At 12 years, it works like small maidservant in the farms. Teenager, it finds herself in the sisters in Orleans. Is this there that they meet?

In Saint-Etienne, the other Madeleine has an almost identical course. A life of labour as worker to the factory, waitress in a restaurant, cleaning lady in a hotel. She never married, forever have children, always lived in Saint-Etienne. “I was placed as a nurse very early. I know my family, neither my parents, nor my brothers and sisters.”
Madeleine of Vittel deposited a complaint for usurpation of identity. The business is delicate. An examining magistrate will be named to try to disentangle the truth of the forgery, to find, perhaps, the origin of an error of marital status… The parquet floor of Epinal does not exclude to resort to a genetic expertise by exhuming the body of Anna, the mother of Madeleine, dead here seventy-five years.

While waiting, the gendarmes of Epinal and the police officers of Saint-Etienne organized a confrontation in the Loire. Both Madeleine met. Two old ladies which were greeted politely, one nothing cold, while saying itself, like an echo: “Hello, I am Madeleine Morès, and I do not know you.”

Monique Raux
Article published in the edition of the 01.09.06