« Quand je suis né, je suis mort »

« Quand je suis né, je suis mort » is the sentence with which Loïc begins a repeatedly rewritten account of his life. It gives birth a double meaning: he entered the world, but understands that a part of him died there too. The expression condenses his account of losing his twin and his enduring sense that his self was divided before he could know why.

A Life Recounted Through Its Beginning

The words open what Loïc calls the repeatedly begun novel of his life. He describes the self he has now as permanently fragmented, and says that he learned only later that he had been two: his double had disappeared from the visible world but remained, for him, an inseparable invisible companion. The sentence is therefore not simply a metaphor for an unhappy beginning. It states the structure through which Loïc retrospectively understands his identity.

The passage also draws attention to the act of writing. Loïc reads his own words with a doubtful, critical expression, as if the account were an attempt to approach an experience that resists being put into words. He reports that people later told various versions of what happened, but that no one said his mother had died carrying the other part of him. They did not know the lost twin was his sister, or that Loïc understood her as another part of a greater self. His opening sentence gives a name to what family knowledge had left unspoken.

The Twin and the Family Silence

The birth Loïc calls the night of the iceberg remains surrounded by uncertainty. Marie-Ange D’Anjou, granddaughter of Le Fondateur, died in childbirth at twenty-four. Her death was treated as a catastrophe too painful to discuss openly, and the circumstances of that night were never fully known. Loïc describes the silence around it as a family taboo, entwined with a wider sense of fatality pursuing Le Fondateur’s family.

Against that silence, the expression asserts a personal truth without claiming that the mystery has been solved. Loïc cannot fully explain what happened or why. He experiences the twin’s absence as a bridge between himself and his mother, but also as an enigma suspended over his life. The phrase makes the loss present while preserving its unresolved character: the twin is gone from the world others can see, yet never wholly gone from Loïc’s sense of himself.

Incompleteness and the Search for Origins

Loïc compares the mystery of his origins to the infinite and the Holy Trinity, observing that divine threeness seems easier to understand than his own beginnings. He knows, at least, that one can be double in one, and wonders why one could not also be triple. This reflection extends the opening expression from a statement of bereavement into a question about how multiple selves might belong to one being.

His response is an unceasing effort to return to the origin: to dive back into the moment of birth, circle the black iceberg of anguish, and recover what he imagines lies hidden there. He describes the surviving part of himself as incomplete, beating with only one wing. The image gives the loss a bodily and spatial force: what is missing is not an incidental piece of the past but a part of the life he believes he might otherwise have possessed.

A Self Under Reconstruction

The expression’s decisive consequence is its account of Loïc as unfinished. He tries continually to bring the escaped part back into being and regain the fullness of himself. Yet his language presents this not as a completed recovery but as a perpetual construction site: an ardent, often desolate attempt to rebuild and rejoin what is missing.

The sentence thus holds together death, memory, and desire. Loïc’s twin loss cannot be made fully intelligible, and the family’s silence leaves the origin story incomplete; nevertheless, the act of writing lets him return to that absence and give it a form. The words do not resolve the mystery. They establish it as the enduring point around which his understanding of self and his search for wholeness turn.