Blow of blues in the publishing world! Betty Mialet and Bernard Barrault, the editors of Jean Teulé, announced this Wednesday, October 19 that their author “would have succumbed to cardiac arrest” on the evening of October 18. A death that could be linked to food poisoning. Portrait of a marvelous iconoclast.
When we think of Jean Teulé, we first hear a laugh, joyful, almost childish, communicative, and we see a long body of a grand duduche (1.96 meters), all dressed in black. And then there is the smile, which crosses his face, and the sparkling eyes. He was called “the great”, and he had everything great, Jean Teulé, a great faithful, to his companion, Miou-Miou, to his publishers, Betty Mialet and Bernard Barrault, whom he followed when they left Julliard for create their Mialet/Barrault house, to his friends, too. And to his readers, whom he delighted with his iconoclastic historical novels embroidered in a colorful language to sting beetles.
In fact, the former TV columnist and best-selling novelist (his Montespan, among others, sold more than 500,000 copies) could have become a mechanic. Child of Arcueil, son of the janitor of the communist town hall, this bad student (according to him) owes having continued his studies to a third-grade drawing teacher, seduced by his scribbles, then having entered the saint saints, L’Echo des savanes, a temple of comics from the 1970s and 1980s, thanks to the cartoonist André Barbe. Eleven years and eleven albums later, in 1987, Bernard Rapp hired him as a columnist for his program L’Assiette anglaise. The cartoonist acquires there a capital sympathy and a certain cathodic know-how. Because TV was only a parenthesis before he found his way into writing.
Beginning of the 1990s, new inflection in its sinuous course. “You should write a novel”, advises him one day Elizabeth Gille, publisher at Julliard. A great lover of poetry, discovered through Léo Ferré, he took up, at the age of 38, in 1991, the challenge with Rainbow for Rimbaud… for a forgotten father…), but, very quickly, the friend of poets and the lost, with a style that was not always very academic, became a safe bet for his publishing house, chaining successes since 2004 and his Ô Verlaine ! Historical novels or fanciful breathing (Le Magasin des suicides), everything seems to smile on Jean Teulé.
In 2008, it’s the jackpot! His work devoted to M. de Montespan, one of those cursed characters he likes, ignites sales. It is to a cuckold with a big heart that the writer owes his good fortune. A discovery, it is true, that this Gascon with an insane destiny, “separated but inseparable” from the beautiful and witty Athénaïs de Montespan, appointed mistress of Louis XIV. In a very colorful language, which mixes the prettiness of the 17th century and the familiarity of the 21st, Teulé recreates the unlikely mores of the nobility of the time.
In 2011, after having published, with Dargaud, with his accomplice Florence Cestac, a comic strip on the life of Charlie Schlingo, a crazy cartoonist, and having paid for a little carnage in the Dordogne at the end of the 19th century, with Eat it if you want, it draws Charly 9. Or the story of a young monarch with morbid impulses – Charles IX (1550-1574) – responsible for the massacre of Saint-Barthélemy, in short, a choice piece for Jean Teulé, crazier for the king than ever. Historians have not finished debating it, but Teulé has decided: his Charly 9 will have been only a puppet in the hands of his mother, the imposing Catherine de Medici, “Florentine venom”, who does not has eyes only for Henri, the youngest, Duke of Anjou and prince of the ephebes. With the accents of a cartoonist à la Hara-Kiri, Teulé kneads History, plays with language, amuses the gallery. A delight…
Enter the dance, Crénom, Baudelaire! (iconoclastic portrait of a Baudelaire in crazy and repulsive punk), Agincourt in rainy weather, the successes are linked. And Jean Teulé remains the same. Smiling, laughing, making booksellers and festivals happy. Just a personal memory: Brive, Saturday, November 5, 2016, 6:30 p.m. The C. A. Brive Corrèze intends to lift its affront of the previous week (a nice rout against ASM Clermont) by rolling the poor Bayonnais, red lantern of the Top 14. The great Teulé gives the ball to send off with enthusiasm. And stay in the stands until the end of the match, which we watched together, delighted. Before finding the “gratin” Germanopratin less fond of the oval ball. Nice moments of complicity, Jean will have spread many in his life. Readers and friends will remember it forever.
