Gilles & Jeanne

One of sixty-two copies on Arches vellum after forty-two copies on Holland paper.

How could Joan of Arc, so lucid, with such strong common sense, have accepted as a companion this Gilles de Rais whose monstrosity continues to revolt and fascinate, half a millennium after his torture? To this question - always dodged or left hanging by historians - Michel Tournier tries to answer: what if Gilles de Rais had only become a monster under Joan's influence? What if he had placed his soul in her hands for better or for worse? For better: liberation of Orléans, victory at Patay, coronation of Charles VII. For worse: injury, capture, trial, condemnation by the Church, pyre. Gilles de Rais followed Joan to the end, to witchcraft, to the pyre on which he climbed nine years after her.

Michel Tournier was born in 1924, to a Gascon father and a Burgundian mother, academics and Germanists. Every year, the parents sent their four children on holiday to Freiburg im Breisgau to a Catholic student residence where they could practice the language. Michel Tournier was then, according to his own words, "a hyper-nervous child, subject to convulsions, an imaginary flayed man". In 1931, he was sent to a children's home in Switzerland for health reasons. He was passionate about music.
Of his stays in Germany, he says: "I experienced Nazism at the age of nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. Then came the war." He remembers the military parades of Nazism, the speeches of the Führer, denounced by his father. A "bad student," he was excluded from several schools and then, from 1935, studied at the Saint-Erembert college in Saint-Germain-en-Laye before being enrolled as a boarder with the fathers of Alençon.
In 1941, the family left the large family home in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, occupied by the German army, for an apartment in Neuilly. Michel Tournier then discovered philosophy at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly, where his teacher was Maurice de Gandillac and his classmate Roger Nimier. The books of Gaston Bachelard, discovered during the holidays, convinced him to opt for a degree in philosophy after his baccalaureate. A student at the Faculty of Letters in Paris, he defended a diploma in philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1946, he obtained permission to go to Germany, to Tübingen, where he met Gilles Deleuze, to learn German philosophy. He stayed there for four years and, on his return, took the competitive examination for the agrégation in philosophy, which he failed. "My life was destroyed, I was in pieces," he confided.
To earn a living, he did translations at Plon and then joined the radio. In 1955, when Europe No. 1 was created, he was part of the team. He wrote the advertising messages for "diapers, make-up removers and laundry detergent". In 1959, he joined Plon. He also presented a monthly television show, Chambre noire, devoted to great photographers.
He published his first novel in 1967, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, which won the Grand Prix de l'Académie Française, after which he later wrote Vendredi ou la vie sauvage, for young readers. Le Roi des Aulnes won the Prix Goncourt in 1970. This was the beginning of a career entirely dedicated to literature. From then on, Michel Tournier, in his old presbytery in the Chevreuse Valley, devoted himself to the "craft of writer".
He travels to Canada, black Africa, the Sahara.
Since 1972, he has been a member of the Académie Goncourt, dividing his time between writing, articles, essays and also meetings with his audience, young people.