A Eulogy for Elsa Cayat, Who Laughed at Her Killers

Elsa Cayat was a French psychoanalyst and columnist who was murdered in the January 2015 shooting attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices. She was the sole female fatality at that terror site

In memory of the murdered ‘Charlie Hebdo’ satirist, book lover, therapist, Jew

By Delphine Horvilleur for Tablet Magazine

The following eulogy was given by Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur at the funeral of Elsa Cayat, in Paris, France, on Jan. 15, 2015. It is reproduced, in a translation from the French, with consent of the family.

Elsa used to begin each of her therapy sessions by saying to her patients: “So, now, tell me!”

So, I would like for us to listen to her invitation to hear other people’s words, and for us to speak, even if this cemetery is so far removed from her disarrayed office, even if the smoke from her cigarette no longer swirls in the air. Let us tell, at this place, who Elsa Cayat was, who she was for her parents, her brothers and sisters, her family, her partner, her nephews, her patients, her colleagues, for her Charlie Hebdo family, for her daughter.

We must tell how exceptionally intelligent this woman was, how vivacious she was in her wit and humor that you all knew. We must tell of the life of a woman who was out of the ordinary, as though we were telling a story—and I think she loved stories. Just as she loved books.

As a teenager she once told her sister: “You ought to read a book a day! Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud … It doesn’t matter!” That was her minimum diet for culture and for her love of knowledge and for words, as she conceived of them.

Elsa was passionately in love with books, especially detective stories—because she adored plots and novels that you can’t put down and where the endings, she would say, let you “always discover who the killer was, and even his motive.”

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