To a Great Adventurer...

I knew a Lady who was a great adventurer. She lived many years in Africa, she was a well of knowledge and culture, and her life was fulfilled with great experiences. She lived to the extreme, fighting and overcoming her fears, just to make sure that she learned more, that she did it and that she was giving a sense to her life.

She taught me a lot... In fact she taught me everything. She taught me Love, Respect, Acceptance, Honesty, Affirmation of myself and self respect, Humility, and much more. She taught me that the greatest and only richness is knowledge, not wealth, as wealth comes and goes and you can loose it at anytime. She taught me how to deal with misery and how to help people in great need.
She had four children but was taking care of many others... I specially remember Zenabou, Aishatou, Mariama, Mohamed, just to name few... All poor children to whom she provided food, clothes, education, and a little bit of joy and happiness.




When she had some spare time she was packing up her Range Rover with food supplies and medicine, she was taking her dog Scharly with her, and she was hitting the road toward the bush to check on nomads camps and provide them some relief. It was a necessity for her to know she could accomplish to help many.

She taught me how to love and respect the Nature and the animals that live in its wilderness. She taught me how to vanquish my nervousness while facing this wilderness, how to appreciate it and integrate it. Thanks to her I knew it were no such wild animal that you cannot approach, talk to or even touch.

We went so many time together in the bush, to hunt Lions, Elephants, Giraffes and other wild animals with our camera.


Photography was one of her passion, and she was good at it. She also had a fascination : the Sahara desert. Therefore, it is only natural that she was the first one who told me about “The Little Prince” of St Exupery, this little Prince who live on a planet with three volcanoes and one Rose. She explained me that it is the time you have spent for your rose that makes your rose so important. I offered her that Rose... She explained me that it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye... She explained me that you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. With the Little Prince she taught me about the Sahara, the Tenere that she loved so much. For her the Sahara was the most beautiful and the saddest of the scenery. She believed like me, that any man is not called to the desert and that no one called is elected... We climbed and walked the dunes of the Tenere together many time, and just sat on the top of some, watching the sunset over this ocean of sand which is the Sahara, listening to Mozart... Fascinating ! Thanks to her, today, looking back, I realize that, it is there that I felt the highest and strongest feeling of happiness in front of a natural scenery. I do not know anyone who came back untouched from a trip to the desert. She learned one day that somewhere on the middle of the Tenere, on the top of a mass of mountain called «The Mount Greboun» at an altitude of 5400 ft were twelve Olive trees of 3000 years old (Oleo-Laperrini) and that only 9 people manage to find them since they were discovered by Laperrine on the beginning of the 20th century, 9 people who were great adventurers and explorators like Charvet and Loubert. She decided she was going to be one of them. Therefore, in 1986 we went to find them... It was a pure challenge as we had to climb rocks bigger than houses and that there was no path, we had no exact direction. Just one more adventure as she loved them. We left our camp that we had settled on the bottom of the Greboun at 6am... we were six of us. By noon we were only three, all the other had abandoned because of the tough conditions. By 2pm only her and I were still climbing. She «resigned» by 3.30pm, I continued by myself. She was only half a mile away from them and she didn’t know. At 4.30pm I arrived at the first Olive tree... the others were just all around, in between the boulders. It was a very special moment! I was the 10th person in the world to see them, to touch them. I regretted that she wasn’t here with me, her who wanted so much to be part of this. I cut a little bough out of one, stock it between my teeth and went back down to the camp. It took me 10 and half hours to climb up, and only 3 hours to go down. When I arrived at the camp with the Olive tree bough, she knew that one day she was going to go back up there and find them. She did, 4 years later, by herself only, the day of her 60th birthday. She came back with her own olive tree bough, which she saved religiously for the rest of her life. Then there were other adventure like in the Dogon Country in Mali or the Somba Country between Benin and Togo...
For her, the Somba Country was about Keita. Keita was an old «fetishist» or «sorceress» that we met one day during one of our safaris while we were totally lost on the middle of nowhere. Somba people had a reputation for canibalism !... Keita welcomed us and gave us some fruits and water. She didn’t understood one word of what we were speaking because she wasn’t speaking anything else than the Somba’s dialect. She was only nodding her head listening to us with her pipe stock between her teeth. That day, she may have saved our life though, as she accepted us and her people didn’t harmed us certainly by respect to her. The Lady, the great adventurer went back few times in the following years to visit her and at our last visit, Keita made her a gift : she offered her her pipe !!!... It was the most important gift she ever received as it was the simplest but the purest proof of friendship between two women coming from two different world, culture, life and society.
There were many adventures...
Then came a time when the great adventurer had to leave Africa as she was retiring. She didn’t fly back to France. She went with her Range Rover across the Sahara, through Algeria, Morocco, Spain back to France. There she couldn’t hunt the Lions or the Elephant anymore with her camera, so she decided she was going to hunt the wolves... She adjusted with difficulty to her new environment, but she found new way of adventure and may be one day accepted the fact it was no living in Africa anymore. She went back there few time, to Tombouctou, Agadez, Bandiagara, Sarafere, Niafounke, and elsewhere like Morocco where she went to hike in the Atlas Mountain at 72 years old for 21 days... She continued to live reading St Exupery, Fromentin, Isabelle Ebehard and wrote about adventures. She finally mixed a little bit of sand from the Sahara with the heath’s dirt from where she was living then as a sign that the Cevennes region of France was "taming" her... She vanquish her last fear at 74 years old... The one of riding horses.
Last year she was diagnosed with a grade four glioblastoma, which is the most malignant brain tumor. She was given 11 month to live. She lived those last month of her life to the most she could, with the burden of the disease. I spent the last three month by her side and what I believed was going to be the worse time in my life, became in fact a unique very privileged moment. And I was with her, five month ago, holding her hand when she passed courageously at her home 11 month after being diagnosed. She requested that on her headstone be carved « Que la terre lui soit legere» (Let the ground be light above her) so her soul and spirit can still adventure all over... I carved it myself. She went for her last journey, wrapped into her Dogon blanket with little bit of sand of this Tenere she loved so much, her Olive tree bough she was so proud of, the Pipe that Keita gave her, and a "sand rose" from the Little Prince.

She left, to all of us who admired and loved her, a 400 pages handwritten book, and another book that she published just for her loved one few years ago, as well as a Range Rover with a lot of great memories.
Before going for her last adventure she gave us her eulogy, which she wrote herself. I am the one who read it...:
«Everything is consumed... Here I am at the edge of the Earth, at the end of the life, at the extreme limit where we walk so close to the eternity, if eternity exist... But henceforth wherever I am, I will always regret the country of sun and sand and the one of the chestnut and heath growing on the Cevenne’s schist. I loved the life, I just loved... Simple! I loved the ones who surrendered me, my close ones, the people I met. I gave a lot, I received little. But that was great. Someone said: «The end of the life is the beginning of survival»... If it were true, it would be wonderful because somehow I will be close and next to you. I would like that my life end up like one of those African fall, with a light sky, without to many decrepitude, regrets and resentments. Some people speak about a passage, if it exists, I will find it and like before, on the top of the dunes in Chirriet I will be arrived»
She witnessed so much pain in misery during her life that she didn't believed in God.

Since she left I lost motivation and interest in many things. Including in my professional life : why accomplish something that she won't be here to witness, be proud of or even ever know because she didn't had the chance to come back to St Martin before passing ?
I am so proud of her, I miss her so much, I have an immense and incredible void...
She was a great adventurer...
I was her Little Prince...
She was my Mom...

Today, without notice, my Dad sold the Range Rover !... I feel I lost my Mom a second time...