If the writer Georges Arnaud was acquitted from the massacre in 1941 of his family, a triple homicide never elucidated, his daughter accuses him today of being the assassin, triggering the anger of the son.
AFP
The novelist became known in 1950, under pseudonym, with the bestseller “The salary of fear”, then adapted to the cinema by Henri-Georges Clouzot, with Yves Montand.
Georges Arnaud is now the protagonist of one of the books that are most speaking during this literary school year, at Grasset editions: “In Violentia Veritas”, by his daughter Catherine Girard, released on August 20.
Henri Girard, his real name, owed his first moment of celebrity to the case of the Esseau chateau, in Dordogne, a place of a triple homicide which aroused a resounding assize trial, in the spring of 1943. Accused of having mutilated his father, his aunt and a good with a serpe on October 24, 1941, he went out under the acclamations. For justice, the file is closed: the assassin has never been found and these murders remain unpunished.
“Dark lyricism”
On the one hand, Catherine, who made a shattering entry into literature at 62, writes that her father, to whom she asked, a teenager, in the 1970s, if he was the murderer, replied that yes. Then it unrolls the life of this man, from 1930 to the murders.
It is a spectacular crescendo, leading to an extremely violent final scene. He impressed literary criticism. The world has found him “ardent and meticulous, of a dark lyricism”, and does not hesitate to say that the author is “the daughter of the assassin”, a “signer both homicide and charming”.
On the other side, his half-brother denounces pure fiction. “Nothing, in the personality and the journey of Henri Girard, corroborates these accusations,” wrote in a statement to AFP Henri Girard, son of the writer, 78, and who bears the same first name as his father.
“These accusations are serious and we contest them firmly,” he adds, on behalf of his children and grandchildren. When questioned, Henri Girard said he suffered from credit today given to this thesis. “My father faced his life all life from the accusations of people who were his political enemies and who constantly brought him back to this story. I am sorry that it reappears today, coming from her daughter ”.
“I had been reassured by the book of Philippe Jaenada, who seems to me to have done a very serious job. For me, it is strictly impossible that he killed, ”he concludes.
– “fabric of lies” –
Philippe Jaenada, writer, is a friend of his son, Emmanuel. This specialist in ancient various facts published on the affair a marking book, “La Serpe”, a prize femina 2017, which concludes the innocence of Georges Arnaud, who died in 1987. Questioned by AFP, the writer, after reading “in Violentia Veritas”, sees it as “a fabric of lies”.
Catherine and Henri Girard, who do not have the same mother, were better. In 1988, they had won a defamation trial against the daily newspaper of Paris, which qualified their father as a murderer. In 2023, Catherine, godmother of the Fair of the Polar of the Château d’Escoire, spoke about the 1941 affair without accusing her father.
At Grasset, the prospect of scandal is not delighted. As other authors have noted in recent years, having a novel attacked by family members of characters who appear there is a heavy handicap if one claims to be a literary prize. The juries generally solve the problem by dismissing the targeted book.
“Dissensus within the family does not look at us. The literary strength of this book is indisputable and that is what made us want to program it at the start of the school year, ”the CEO of Grasset, Olivier Nora, told AFP.
Catherine Girard refused to talk to AFP. In the world, she said: “I wrote on a family tragedy of which I have been soaked since childhood. I grew up in the wound that my father cut himself in himself ”.
