Thibault de Montalembert is a real miracle. In the 1980s, the actor suffered a tragic accident. During the summer, his sister-in-law was accompanying him to Evron station after a stay in his native Mayenne when their car rolled over several times. If the actor survived, this is not the case of the mother, who died instantly. Thibault de Montalembert lived a long convalescence after a head trauma. “Six months sleeping fifteen hours a day. Six months where, locked up in my maid’s room above my parents’ apartment, I read mystics,” he confided to Paris Match. “I had a head trauma that caused me to lose immediate memory of what had happened, and above all, it was as if my batteries were totally discharged and I had to sleep 15/16 hours a day” , remembered Thibault de Montalembert in the show There is not just one life in life this Saturday, January 28.
After his accident, he had decided to enter religious orders at the Trappist monastery of Notre-Dame d’Aiguebelle, recommended to him by one of his brothers. “I was told: ‘You have to recover your health in the mountains’. I said: ‘Okay, very well, but I want it to be in a monastery’, since at the time I was thinking of going to the seminary, added Thibault de Montalembert. I fell in love with the place, the people, this way of life and I wanted to go back there. Yes, it suited me quite well, it lacked a few women. ” At the time, the monks advised him to leave the monastery for a few months to take his baccalaureate. “I returned to Paris. I passed my baccalaureate by correspondence, and I saw people, cousins, family, etc. And then, I met a young woman, with whom I fell very much in love and that I married”, he added, happy to have finally embraced the profession of actor.
Thibault de Montalembert: “I will devote my life to God”
In his adolescence, he was more oriented towards orders. “In my little room at the boarding house, where I’ve been enrolled for four years, I wake up all elated. Turned towards the light of a wheat field, I make this promise to myself: I’m going to be a priest, I don’t want to fight anymore. against this vocation that has tormented me since the age of 9. I will devote my life to God, it will be magnificent…”, described Thibault de Montalembert in the columns of Paris Match. But if he changed his mind, the actor still has a strong connection with the Catholic religion. “The quest for God has lived in me since childhood, he explained in the magazine Le Pèlerin. I pray in the morning and in the evening, these appointments are fundamental for me. I am also a reader of Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila, as well as the writings of the fools-in-Christ of Russian spirituality.”
Thibault de Montalembert © Tiziano Da Silva – Cyril Moreau
