Jean Teule liked “special people”. Whether fictitious or historical, he invited us with his raw and visual pen to penetrate the intimacy of his characters. On October 8, 2020, he came to talk about his latest novel in Le Monde d’Élodie on franceinfo. After Rimbaud, Verlaine, Charles IX or the Marquis de Montespan, he attacked Baudelaire in Damn it, Baudelaire! published by Mialet-Barrault. “I am less painful than him, he had estimated, smilingly comparing himself to the poet. As a kid, I was kinda nice, a little bit different, he describes himself. It has become my life to write and I am very lonely. So it’s not at all a pain to spend a year and a half on a book. It suits me perfectly.”
His childhood, he spent on the primary school benches alongside Jean-Paul Gaultier, who became the stylist and the great couturier that we know. And he notes with a certain naivety: “Both of us felt different from the other kids. And neither he nor I are amazed by what happened to us. It’s like we know we’re going to be okay, that it’s going to be okay and that we were going to trace our route. I have been very lucky.”
“The quality that I recognize at least is that, when they held out their hand to me, I knew how to take it.”
Jean Teuleat franceinfo
Jean Teulé had started out as a comic strip author until the Angoulême Festival strangely clipped his wings by awarding him a prize in 1990 for exceptional contribution to the renewal of the comic strip genre. “I loved doing comics”he assured, but, qWhen they gave me that stuff, I thought I was dead. It was a posthumous prize. The next day, it’s true, I stopped.”
On February 2, 2022, Jean Teulé is again the guest of Le Monde d’Elodie. This time, he recounts the battle of Agincourt in Agincourt in rainy weather, still published by Mialet-Barrault. Unlike the history books, he chooses a very short story time, from the day before the battle to the day after. “I wanted us to feel like we were there and see how something like that was organized”he explained. “30,000 French in cuirass, in great shape, against 5,000 sick English. The French got knocked out. And we say to ourselves: but it’s not possible, they couldn’t have been so stupid!”
And mission accomplished. His very visual, almost cinematographic way of telling is one of his prides. “People tell me when reading the book, we hear the noise, we see the colors, we have the smells… And that, I like that”he confided, in his warm voice in which a certain tenderness pierced. If a book can have that magic, it’s great.”
A very real magic because he told that the children of the schools where he was invited, came to see him and said to him:Sir, if you were the one giving us history lessons, we’d get better grades.. I thought it was very cute”he remembered, a bit moved, he who didn’t really like school, to the point of having missed being thanked in third before being caught by a drawing teacher who believed in him.
A journey that strongly resembles a message of hope and of which he said to himself “happy”. However, Jean Teulé had entrusted this bizarrely growing concern over the years. “This is the first interview I’ve done on Agincourt and I said to myself: I hope I won’t be too stupid. And I’m more and more worried with each book. I don’t know why. I’m afraid let people be disappointed. I tell myself that it’s the twentieth novel, and that I’ve been selling them for twenty years, that’s good! But not at all. I’m more and more nervous, more and more more worried. I cross my fingers saying to myself: I hope that people will hang on to this thing.
In each book, Jean Teulé “put everything“. To the question of what the next one will talk about, he answered a little lost: “Every book I write feels like my last. I have no idea what the next one will be!” That day, however, he did not hide his pride that his book on the Marquis de Montespan was adapted and played at the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris. “I think it’s fun, it’s good to have his books adapted into plays, films, comics. It’s still really lucky! I would just complain, eh ?”
Jean Teulé left us on the evening of Tuesday October 18, at the age of 69. Its publishing house announced it on Wednesday.