Guillaume Valette came out physically unscathed from the Bataclan. When Alain, his father, found him in the middle of the night in Paris, the young man was “Covered in blood, icy and exhausted”. But without apparent injuries. Tuesday, October 26, this septuagenarian with an enveloping voice nevertheless came to evoke, like so many other parents before him, the memory of his son at the trial of the attacks of November 13. Guillaume committed suicide two years later seeing hell too closely and was recognized, in 2019, as the 131e victim of these attacks. He was 31 years old.
“Guillaume did not receive bullets in the body, but invisible bullets, which killed him, slowly but surely, begins the father, while a photo of the son appears on the screen, a frail figure posing on a spring day in front of the Louvre pyramid, headphones around his neck. In the next two years, sour mental state has deteriorated, like gangrene. On the morning of November 19, 2017, it was in a room at the Jeanne d’Arc clinic, in Saint-Mandé, that he was found hanged. “
On November 13, 2015, Guillaume was in the pit when the first shots rang out. He told those close to him about this encounter with death which, he was unaware of at the time, had entered him. The father restores the son’s story: “He lay down on the floor and saw on his left a young girl staring at the ceiling. He understood that she was dead. Her body was seized with an attack of tremors. A young woman next to him shook his hand and said, “Calm down, you’ll be fine”. If she is still alive, we thank her for this gesture of tenderness in the midst of chaos towards our child. “
“The life before, it’s over”
Taking advantage of a crowd movement between two gusts, Guillaume landed on a mass of people cut down by bullets – which he described atrociously as “Human mud” -, try to “Hide your head in the tangle of bodies”, then ends up shutting himself up with other spectators in a box until the intervention of the police forces. “For more than two hours, Guillaume heard everything. What haunted him for a long time were the cries of the wounded. “ When his family finds him in the middle of the night, he says: “The life before is over. “
The father now takes up the story of his son’s long descent into hell. The following months resemble those lived and told in this trial by a number of survivors of November 13th. The young man presents all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress: hypervigilance, nightmares, anxiety… He hardly ever goes out, avoids closed places, is affected by the slightest news item, each new attack awakens his anxieties.
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