Queen Camilla’s visit to Bibliothèque Nationale de France : a student’s perspective

An invitation to Paris to attend the launch of a new literary prize? I thought it was a joke or spam, but it turned out to be the truth; which is why on 20th September I packed my bags and from St Andrews to Paris to attend the launch of the Prix de l’Entente littéraire by Her Majesty The Queen and Mme Macron.

At la Bibliothèque nationale de France I met a party of students from the University of London Institute in Paris and we were lucky enough to meet, among others, Celia Imrie before the arrival of The Queen and Mme Macron. In her speech, The Queen reminisced about her time in Paris as a student and spoke of her passion for reading and the debt she feels she owes to great authors for making us dream. Mme Macron then spoke of her experience as a French teacher and her desire to encourage as many young people to read as much as possible. They spoke of the close cultural relations between our two countries and their desire to see these maintained today, which is where the Prix comes in, since it will be awarded to writers of Young Adult Fiction.

At the same time as we were considering the future of Young Adult Fiction, we were surrounded by the France’s literary heritage: Hugo, Voltaire and, my personal favourite, a beautiful copy of Montaigne’s Essais, which once belonged to Elizabeth I. Our journey through French history continued with a guided tour of the collections from the Director of the Library where we caught glimpse of a collection which extends from Antiquity to May 68 via everything in-between.

Although I did not get the chance to speak to the Queen or Mme Macron, I can only describe this experience as incredible. I am still struggling to wrap my head around the sequence of events that has taken me from discussion the shortlist for the Prix Goncourt 2021 in a St Andrews seminar room to la BNF.

In her speech, the Queen quoted Victor Hugo with a quote with which I think any bibliophile would agree and which seems to me to be a particularly fitting way to describe my experience : « Apprendre à lire, c’est allumer du feu ; toute syllable épelée étincelle »

Bonne lecture à tous !