Fictional biographies

Textes et documents, Paris, Éditions du Sud et A. Michel. Note: Awaiting annotation.

Variétés, Paris, Éditions du Sud. Note: Awaiting annotation.

Pierre Seghers, coll. Poètes d’aujourd’hui n°120, 190 pages. Note: Awaiting annotation.

Paris, Les Editions du Sud, 345 pages This biographical novel begins with a 3-page introduction, Le 19ème siècle et le triomphe de la bourgeoisie, which ends as follows: “Certainly, from 1830 to the first decades of our 20th century, this was the golden age of the bourgeoisie, with that unpleasant nightmare of the Commune, a…

Paris, Éditions du Sud, Albin Michel, 335 pages “Just as Jacobin and Napoleonic expansion had tended to liberate peoples before giving them a new discipline, the School of Five broke the chains with which Italian and Classical tyranny had burdened the realm of music; in this sense Balakirev and his satellites, Borodin, Moussorgsky, César Cui,…

Paris, Seghers, 349 pages. ” 1896 ; un dur hiver noircit les vitres de Paris ; la neige a couvert les trottoirs d’un drap épais, puis a fondu ; on attend à nouveau qu’elle tombe. Chaque bec de gaz crache sa flamme jaune au cœur d’une plume de paon, irisation des gouttelettes de la brume….

Éditions Albin Michel, Paris, 285 pages. Reissue titled Moi, Kristine, reine de Suède, 1979 The Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar’s monumental work published 7 years earlier, can only come to mind when reading Françoise’s novel. And it is not the transparent clues that she left that will invalidate this observation. One could think of…

In this book, Françoise shows not only the poet, but above all the man Rimbaud in all the ups and downs of his life, with his vices, his eruptions of character. Rimbaud’s genius shines through, with his eruptive temperament, his absolute loyalty to himself, his mockery of all bourgeois morality, and his transformation from poet…

Julliard, 354 pages. Written between 1942 and 1943, this novel is a succession of detailed images and earthy dialogues. The misery of the times that Françoise navigates as best she can finds an echo in the descriptions that she makes of popular life under Louis XIV. A whole world of craftsmen, shopkeepers and rank and…