A mother is carried by a grief that is greater than herself. Vivre tout bas watches for and captures all the signs of her escape. The novel as a quest.

As if born from the landscape, a woman appears at the seaside. We learn that her son, after going through “a great suffering”, is no more. We learn that before disappearing, he entrusted her to the care of his friend Jean, a faithful person, who accompanies her from a respectful and attentive distance. In the village, set back from the shore, she makes the crucial encounter with a child whom fate has made silent.

Between waves and cliffs, between the village and its inhabitants, this woman takes shape before our eyes, silhouette and silence. Already as a little girl, clandestinely, she learned the secret of freedom: she knows how to read and write. The book tells of her momentum towards another version of herself, an escape: Mary, mother and saint, frees herself here slowly but surely from the iconography which already attaches to her steps, which freezes her. And the liturgy which cut her off. But she also discovers herself when meeting others, those who will leave no traces anywhere other than in the memory of the living.