Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre: “I wanted to do justice to Milady”

La Croix : By choosing to tell the story of Milady's life, you're writing a novel about characters from a novel, and not just any characters, created by Alexandre Dumas. That's daring!
Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre: I had a moment of vertigo: what madness to want to write from one of the novels that has known the greatest literary fertility, which has been read, reread, adapted for the cinema 100 times. What struck me was my own blindness: for years, I found it perfectly normal that Milady, judged by twelve men, was condemned to death without further ado. However, years later, I can no longer immerse myself in this story without hearing a dissonance. We cannot condemn Milady today without asking questions. I wanted to do her justice: I slipped into the blanks that Dumas left to give Milady a past, a childhood and quite simply a voice.
La Croıx