Book: Feydeau’s romantic life in a frivolous Paris

Knowing nothing or almost nothing about the life of Georges Feydeau, this French playwright still playing today on the boulevards, we wonder why Thierry Thomas made him the main character of his novel “Feydeau s’en va”. By closing the book, we understand. The life of the author of famous vaudevilles such as “On purge Bébé”, “La dame de chez Maxim’s” or “Le dindon”, is romantic, from start to finish.

Around a thin plot – the idyll of the master, prey to the difficulties of writing a play which will never see the light of day, with Solange-Virginie, who comes to sell him a letter from Napoleon while the butchery of the First World War takes place the headlines of the press – the author delivers an intimate portrait of a singular man and of a frivolous and talented era. There we meet casseroles and artists who will mark the century, during the First World War, a real turning point in literature as in painting.

There is genius in this Feydeau who wrote his first play at the age of 10 and shows himself capable of regulating a mechanics of laughter, with “263 consecutive entrances and exits from the stage” in “Le fil à la patte”. But that is not enough. There also needed to be a mystery to his conception, a dissolute life and a tragic end. Putative son of Napoleon III or his half-brother, the Duke of Morny, Feydeau was a cocaine addict, a collector of impressionists, living for ten years at the Terminus hotel, died mad, having contracted syphilis after a sexual relationship with a young transvestite.

This novel where we meet Labiche, his godfather in the theater, Sacha Guitry and Bernhardt, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Picasso, Rodin, Octave Mirbeau and Alfred Jarry, Jules Renard and Camille Saint-Saëns, and even Chaplin, whom he discovered at the cinema in “Charlot Soldier” or André Breton and the first Dadaists, immerses the reader in the atmosphere of this Paris bubbling with creations, while the war will bleed the entire country, down to the smallest village.

In classic writing which contains a few good words (Thierry Thomas writes about his hero “that he will remain faithful to the cuckold all his life”), “Feydeau s’en va” is easy to read, apart from a passage on work of a room, a little confused. As a reader of the “Tribune de Genève”, we will finally be amused by these few lines: “Parisians from the most privileged backgrounds frequent this reading room at the Terminus. They consult the foreign press, in particular “La Tribune de Genève” deemed more reliable, since it comes from a neutral country.” A beautiful eulogy in a novel this fall.

“Feydeau goes away”, by Thierry Thomas, Albin Michel, August 2024, 272 pages, 31 fr. 50 to 35 francs.

“The Tribune of Books”

The “Tribune de Genève” offers you shared readings, reviews, book news, reports and your favorites.

Other newsletters

Log in

Olivier Bot has been deputy editor-in-chief since 2017, head of the World section between 2011 and 2017. Alexandre de Varennes Press Prize. Author of “Search and investigate with the internet” at Presses universitaire de Grenoble.More info

Did you find an error? Please report it to us.

0 comments