L'histoire de Charles Brunet

Synopsis of L'histoire de Charles Brunet

In a village in the Deux-Sèvres region, in the spring of 1981, honorary notary Charles Brunet buries his wife, Servane, whom he once married for interest. For the old man, this is an opportunity to look back on his life, to rediscover the taste of his poor childhood, and the harshness of the daily battles to escape the fatalities of peasant misery. He reviews how, pushed by his mother, a farm servant and widow at twenty, he eventually achieved comfort and respectability. The death of Servane, the silent companion of his life, makes Charles Brunet discover that, entirely focused on his ambition, he had cut himself off from those whose happiness he wanted: his wife, his son, and his daughters. In this French countryside shaken by wars and progress, he had not understood in time that his success, which represented all his revenges, already contained all his failures. Told by Marguerite Gurgand in her quiet and friendly voice, the story of this man at the end of his path of illusions is also that of this dizzying century where we risk understanding too late that one cannot live without tenderness and memory.