“Louis II of Bavaria”, by Jacques Bainville, preface by Jean-Paul Bled, Texto, 288 p., €9.50.
“The Constellation Rimbaud”, by Jean Rouaud, Folio, “Essays”, 176 p., 7,80 €.
“Four murders and a black and white ball. Correspondence and interview”, by Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke, translated from English (United States) by Michel Waldberg and Jacques Tournier, Rivages, “Poche”, 335 p., €9.50.
Stellar twins, exact contemporaries, Louis II of Bavaria (1845-1886) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) were undoubtedly none, but each in his own way and according to his purse, the two most staggering impediments to straight management and rounded digestion of the second 19th century.e century. The first sowing panic and protest in a kingdom which he inherited at the age of 22 from a father sad to tears, imposing a “long, immense and reasoned disorder” of the royal cassette dedicated from then on to financing his lifestyle and his Wagnerian project and to the construction of Disney castles, accepting the merger with Imperial and Bismarckian Prussia only to die interned, drowned in the waters of Lake Starnberg after having twisted his doctor's neck and trying to swim back “the island of happiness”his inner chimera. The second, “considerable passerby”without one, without fear and without rest, walking his life without ever bargaining for it, burping at the table, disrupting literary comitia, sowing in his wake the stones of lightning of a literary revolution still burning to become a Dutch legionnaire in Java then arms trafficker in Ethiopia, returning to die of cancer in a Marseille hospital.
“Making” these two destinies, as we say about a summit or a desert, requires the qualities of an archivist-explorer. In 1900, those of the young Jacques Bainville returning from Bavaria were, for a first book dedicated to Barrès, coldness and levelheadedness. Bainville, along the tight thread of this “psychological biography”does not pinch the lyre but aligns the facts, conducts its analyzes according to a vision which will soon be that of everyday life French Action where he will be the specialist in foreign issues. He seems to see Louis II as his advisors saw him, with moving attention and cautious distance, without allowing himself to be trapped by style or empathy.
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