The Equateurs office, located on the fifth floor without elevator of a building on rue de la Harpe, suits Sylvain Tesson perfectly. Maps are pinned to lopsided walls. It looks less like a publishing house than an adventurers’ den. His cap on his head, tan on his beak, Tesson welcomes us there with his usual good humor. His new book, With the fairies, recounts an accomplished “Celto-Atlantic journey” from Brittany to the Isle of Man via Wales, Ireland and Scotland. We find there the author’s half-Cendrars, half-Tintin character, his mischievous and poetic spirit, his taste for quotes. The subject, on the other hand, can be surprising: when he left for Tibet on the trail of the snow leopard, we could see where he was coming from, but on the trail of the fairies? Would the admirer of Lord Byron and TE Lawrence suddenly think he was an esoteric Peter Pan? “For my book on the snow leopard, I followed the photographer Vincent Munier. I thought she was legendary. Fairies are the same. The object of your quest must be sufficiently invisible and improbable to that you want to get started. It is the famous phrase of Paul Valéry, dear to Régis Debray: “What would we be without the help of what does not exist?” Moreover, the principle of the quest for Grail in the cycle of Chrétien de Troyes is that the Grail remains impalpable, we don’t even know what it is since Chrétien de Troyes has the intelligence to never describe it. I see in the fairies the necessity of ‘escape from the ugliness of reality as the only proposition of existence. Whether I speak of the snow leopard or the fairies, I am only giving a name to the object of continuous research which is called life. “
Tesson’s fans praise his celebration of the beauty of the world, his detractors criticize him for being anti-modern, even downright reactionary. We know the quasi-filial ties which united him to Jean Raspail, another adventurous writer (and avowed royalist), who was winner of the Inter Book Prize in 1987 but definitively lost the left with the expanded reissue of Saints Camp in 2011. Last spring, like Michel Houellebecq and Yann Moix, Tesson was targeted by an essay against journalist François Krug, French reactions. Investigation into the literary extreme right (The threshold). In our era of ideological condemnations, does he fear an annulment comparable to that of his spiritual father? “This accusation that I lean towards the extreme right, I find it so aberrant and insulting… What is the extreme right historically? A path that leads from the idea to violence, therefore to the suffering of people who are the victims. To think that it is embodied by Houellebecq or me, it is a little short on the intellectual level… I add that the book was very poorly written, in addition to being quite poorly informed. But I I am full of compassion towards the author. We must help this boy to study. Perhaps I could pay for a small degree in moral and political sciences at the Sorbonne?”
If the attacks of his enemies left him unmoved, Tesson was more shaken by his accident, which occurred almost ten years ago. On the night of August 20 to 21, 2014, he celebrated in Chamonix the delivery of the manuscript of Berezina published by Guérin. After dinner, he started to climb the facade of his friend Jean-Christophe Rufin’s chalet, and fell ten meters – head trauma, and two weeks in a coma before returning to the living. A decade later, what conclusions does he draw? “It was a radical change. I aged prematurely: in ten meters, I took about twenty years – a rather rapid spatio-temporal acceleration. It forced me to slow down my modus operandi, considerably reduced by the effects of the fall. We no longer travel through the world hobbling as we did in full possession of our sporting means. When the body drags, the gaze deepens, we see things differently. I had to lead a reconquest of myself, and this return to oneself is a journey, an odyssey in the sense of Ulysses, an ascent, a north face. Having had to completely stop drinking, I also tried to find another intoxication. Russia, they have the zapoi, the right dosage to keep you intoxicated for several days in a row after drinking. I’m looking for that too, in my own way…”
“In ten meters, I took around twenty years”
Still childless, and fiercely hostile to marriage, Tesson praises friendship in his books. In White, he was going skiing with two friends; In With the fairies, he sails accompanied by two other friends. It is pointed out to him with a laugh that this gives him an unexpected common point with the sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, author of 3: an aspiration outside, where he established as an absolute model the friendly trio he formed with Didier Eribon and Edouard Louis. Puffing on his cigar with a deadpan air reminiscent of his father, Tesson jokes: “Is their friendship aimed at the conquest of power? For me, that is antithetical to friendship. But it doesn’t It’s not impossible that gentlemen de Lagasnerie, Eribon and Louis are on the side of the indictment… I won’t comment, I don’t know these three musketeers. If they form a separate band, that suits me very well; ‘they deliver justice, then it’s the Superior Council of the Magistracy – and I don’t like magistrates. They are perhaps waging a three-way war, whereas I prefer the Trojan War. For my part, when I put myself under an oak tree, it’s to make a fire or to bivouac with friends, not to administer justice.” When asked who his allies are in the young literary guard, Tesson spontaneously cites three names: Philibert Humm (author in 2022 of the tasty Roman river in the Ecuadors) and “the Dalton brothers of mysticism”, Pierre and Samuel Adrian. With his marvelous prints, Tesson can wander as he pleases, sometimes with these: “We don’t talk about money in France, it’s a principle, but I would have to be ultra snobbish to complain about my success. That allows me to finance crazy trips to complicated places, by bringing together friends. I have fantastic freedom of maneuver. The only pitfall of my success is that it attracts accusations of intent. How do I already call this young boy who failed his Deug in moral and political sciences… Ah yes, François Krug! Well, all this is not serious…”
It is said insistently in the community that the favorite traveler of readers of the Point and Figaro Magazine could find a home base at the French Academy, where Rufin and a former great friend of his father, Jean-Marie Rouart, sit. The person concerned hits the mark: “Immortality scares me: I have too much need to feel mortal, I like too much the urgency of living, the discomfort, the existential precariousness – I am not talking about social precariousness , from which I am sheltered. And then I don’t like armchairs… If academicians sat on ejection seats, then okay, but on immortal armchairs, no! As this change of furniture is not planned for Quai Conti tomorrow, what could make Tesson stop? “Amputation.” That would give him a Rimbaud-style ending. In the meantime, he will continue to wander on his windy soles.
With the fairies, by Sylvain Tesson. The Equators, 214 p., €21.
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