[LIVRES DE NOS MAISONS] Pierre Benoit, the writer engulfed or the Atlantis of literature

In the libraries of our family houses dragging abandoned books. For example, Their authors were famous, perhaps … Similarly, their glory passed. However, This summer, BV invites you to discover some of these writers or these books.

How to differentiate between a family home and a breakfast disguised as “shabby chic”? Furthermore, Scrutinize the library. Consequently, If you find an old stone Benoit Corné. Furthermore, it is because you were not mistaken, you are at the right address.

How to finish convincing oneself that the Western IQ has known some vicissitudes this last century? However, By reading the life of this author. Similarly, At the age of two, he was capable of reciting seventeen fables from La Fontaine by heart (Bigre! Consequently, It makes us look at our last eye). In addition, This is what we discover in the biography of Pierre Benoit. Therefore, [livres de nos maisons] pierre The paradoxical novelist De Gérard de Cortanze, published by Albin Michel in 2012 thanks to the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Consequently, The opportunity. For example, for the publishing house, to exhume one of its authors formerly fetish from the boxes of Emmaus, purgatory of old-fashioned writers: three of its masterpieces (The Châtelaine of Lebanon, Mademoiselle de la Ferté et Axelle) were then reissued, duly prefaced by a few fashionable authors including Amélie Nothomb (is it her first name which gave him the idea of getting off the great hats and mysterious tunes of a character of Pierre Benoit? The novelist was indeed famous for calling all his heroines in A). while the pocket book was responsible for bringing out Atlantis, The leper king et Kœnigsmark.

But, alas, the rise to the surface was short -lived, for Pierre Benoit. His name, now, could be that of one of his 1922 [livres de nos maisons] pierre novels: Forgotten.

From the French academy to garage sales

There is not far from the Capitol in La Roche Tarpéienne. the French Academy with a garage sale. Pierre Benoit (1882-1962). novelist from the beginning of the XX^ein his time experienced an immense success: in 1957, he celebrated his millionth book sold on the occasion of the publication of his 40^e roman, Montsalvat. His most famous novel, Atlantis (1919), sold 1,722,000 copies.

Has he written too much, overlooking his talent, inflation fatally leading to demonetization? Should we see in this literary stakhanovism an element of explanation of its rapid discount? It would be very unfair. because unlike a Barbara Cartland, a Mary Higgins Clark or a Guillaume Musso, compulsive authors of successful beach novels, the frame, the intrigue, the springs and the setting are never the same.

This qualifier of “Gare novel” whose criticisms fell for his works. already during his [livres de nos maisons] pierre lifetime, Pierre Benoit had ended up taking his side, even to draw a certain glory, even reproached by joke when the automobile arrives, in particular in the female universe, for having harmed the pleasure of the reading of the railways.

Taking it for an “easy” author would however be a bad trial. This son of a colonial officer who took very young. strangely from one garrison to another, the travel virus was first a journalist, and he was, before each of his books, a real work of investigation to camp with accuracy the decor. Amateur of pretty women (to whom he was however much less faithful than the enamored lieutenants who populate his work). good alive, great belote player, facetious in his spare time (to escape the stifling affection of a mistress, he simulated a kidnapping by the Féin Sinn which he had just met during a novel on Ireland, [livres de nos maisons] pierre La Chaussée des Géants), not stingy with good words (seeing Claudel whisper in Pagnol’s ear, he slipped to his neighbor: “This is the announcement made to Marius!” »»), he also knew how to be a hard and lonely worker.

Do we blame him. again and again-because these opposite marks you with the red iron for eternity-, his reactionary or even nationalist sympathies (Maurras, Barrès, Bourget, for example) and his (unfounded) condemnation for collaboration which earned him the prison? However, he was absolutely washed with any suspicion, and even Aragon stole his rescue.

Do we want to sublimate, in his novels, “The blessed time of the colonies”as Michel Sardou sang? To highlight too dominating. seductive, dangerous, calculative heroin to enter the modern ideological grid for which women cannot be in essence – it is an insult to her intelligence – that an innocent victim incapable of duplicity?

[livres de nos maisons] [livres de nos maisons] pierre pierre

What novel to start?

Be transgressive: make Pierre Benoit discover your teenagers. especially to young girls, who will feverishly read under the duvet at the light of their electric lamp, cursing you to have summoned them to turn off and especially not to have given them a first name “in A” …

Which one starts? Difficult to say. Some will love exotic scents of The Châtelaine of Lebanon. from Atlantis (whose action is in the Hoggar, a region whose ignorance has earned Pierre Benoit to be failed in aggregation and that, stung to the heart, he then undertook to discover). The scent of tropical flowers tenfold by the tropical dampness competes with that of bewitching women. The former are sometimes as poisonous as seconds. In the young lieutenants who. sinking into the intoxication of the tropics, let their heads turn by local Saba queens and forgetting their little clean and [livres de nos maisons] pierre pious fiancée who remained in the country, we find the «Spahi» of the eponymous novel of Loti.

Others. of which I am prefer the heavy atmospheres on TIC-TAC felted with Comtoise clock, the storms in a cup of tea in Mauriac or the Brontë sisters, the Racinian heroines of the toad chair that are Mademoiselle de la Ferté or Alike. Unpredictable reversal enthusiasts will set their sights on Aïnonovel almost as strange and destabilizing as Irene’s eyesof Raspail. And since we are talking about the most famous of the patagons. how not to see in Kœnigsmark the prefiguration of Hurrah Zarrah ? Pierre Benoit was influenced. but he probably, too, inspired a lot: Axelle (1928) is a Sea silence “Upside down”, but version 14-18.