Le prince de Babylone by Marianne Vic (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le prince de Babylone by Marianne Vic Deborah Gaensbauer Vic, Marianne. Le prince de Babylone. Seuil, 2022. ISBN 978-2-02-150585-6. Pp. 183. This unsparing, novelized biography of Yves Saint Laurent by his niece ruthlessly dismantles the fables that he and his romantic and business partner, Pierre Bergé, meticulously crafted to enhance the prestige of his fashion house and that continue to circulate in curation of exhibitions of his designs. The fashion designer’s self-reinvention as the acronym, YSL, to transcend a louche family history anchored in French colonial Algeria, is portrayed as inevitably unsuccessful: “[l]e succès a gommé les origines, mais les origines l’ont rattrapé à son insu” (73). Vic’s blunt, often coarse, aphoristic style captures the pitilessness of the abject relationships she frames as “l’histoire d’un désir de mort qui l’habita sa vie durant” (20). Her analysis draws on diverse psychoanalytic theories and literary references, particularly to Marcel Proust and Marguerite Duras. The first pages depict a despondent, reclusive Yves Saint Laurent, ravaged by sexual profligacy, drugs, bi-polar swings and multiple suicide attempts, in his sumptuously eclectic apartment on the rue Babylone. It is 2003, one year after inability to create led to his final fashion show, an event he experienced as a kind of death analogous to the fate of his street’s namesake city. Subsequent vignettes and analytic speculations rehearse, in often lurid detail, humiliations, including violent physical abuse he endured as a homosexual youth growing up in colonial Oran. They explain, in Vic’s view, his vengeance-driven craving for fame and wealth and the frenetic debauchery that ultimately transformed “[l]e bel éphèbe au corps souple et aux traits délicats […] en vieille baudruche boulimique” (127). Reprising revelations about the Mathieu-Saint-Laurent family from her autofictional Rien de ce qui est humain n’est honteux (2018), Vic gives equal attention to Yves Saint Laurent’s inheritance of inter-generational familial trauma and denial, “[l]a honte qu’il porte sans le savoir” (69). Contextualized by the “[v]iolence intrinsèque du système colonial, violence faite aux femmes, violence faite aux pauvres en général, aux Arabes et aux Juifs” in Algeria,” her account pivots around a legacy of maternal lack and affective impairment transmitted by multiple generations of sexually abused women on his mother’s side (57). When she focuses on the legacy’s toll on the designer’s mother, Lucienne, the revelations of the tawdry reality behind the publicly purveyed fiction of his affectionate rapport with an elegant mother can be merciless, Vic’s evident affection for her uncle notwithstanding. Describing him forcing Lucienne to maintain this myth as a condition for financial support, for example, she leans in harshly: “[c]’est l’histoire d’un homme qui traite sa propre mère en femme vénale” (110). Her query early in the novel—“Que restet-il d’Yves rendu à sa nudité d’homme, dépouillé de son illustre patronyme?”—is answered by a negative portrait (50). Vic’s closeness to her uncle and being privy to family secrets enrich the account; questions arise nonetheless about the purpose of her raw, tell-all approach beyond a cathartic experience for the author, especially given that much about the legendary designer’s decline is already known. [End Page 256] Deborah Gaensbauer Regis University (CO), Emerita Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French