Au Roi du bois refers to two previous readings: Pierre Michon’s Le Roi du bois and Georges Bataille’s Le Coupable. Those two books led me to James Georges Frazer’s The Golden Bough. This study can be criticized from an ethnological view point, but without a doubt Frazer’s researches spread to all the literature of the 20th century; this book inspired William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and the secret society Acéphale to Georges Bataille… Pierre Michon, using a tortuous and sublime style, describes the miraculous apparition (maybe even mystical ?) of a woman wearing a blue sky dress, stopping her coach in a forest in order to answer the call of nature under the sight of a young shepherd, for ever moved by such a scene. The action takes place in Nemi, near Rome, where in 1834 Turner painted his Golden Bough. Since this discovery, when standing next to a bush, in a wood or a glade, my Nikon in my hand in the hope of seeing – for myself – a coach bursting into the scene and the Beauty that came out of it, I was willing to render the emotion brought by these books I had read, willing to set and maintain the brightness, the subversion of this scene.
This is how, looking for the “Roi du bois” (King of the woods), antique and literary figure, a set of “tiny landscapes” (paysages minuscules), of “precious landscapes”, a herbarium of locations, of secret locations was composed – a series of tiny photographs and drawings trying to capture some distant brightness, kept in the fantasy that a single sight at it could reactivate its magic, its scent, its profoundness. This quest, may look like a archeological research, which aims to search Reality to find Fiction; an “open” undetermined and changing fiction, suggesting mystery and trying to dazzle.
Le Lutetia
Situated in the heart of the emblematic Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, the Lutetia hotel, member of The Set hotels, reveals its new finery. Founded in 1910, the hotel has been the creative crossroads of the greatest artists of the XXth century. After four years of renovation, under the supervision of the renowned architect Jean Michel Wilmotte, the new Lutetia unveils its 184 rooms, including 47 suites, a sumptuous spa with a 17 m pool benefitting from natural light, a restaurant opening on to its very exclusive Patio Art déco and, at the end of the year, the unmissable Lutetia brasserie serving the starred Chef Gerald Passédat's cuisine. Cocktails are to be savoured in the splendid Joséphine bar at the pace of the Jazz nights.