Passwords ” ? Rarely has the title of a section seemed so judicious: Jean-Hubert Gailliot is indeed a smuggler, in his own way, of words and worlds, who likes in his books to cross borders, play with genres and backgrounds, with a weakness for transgressive characters – didn’t he once sign an extravagant Bambi Frankenstein (L’Olivier, 2006), inspired by the metamorphoses of Michael Jackson?
This art of smuggling and this almost childish taste for sleight of hand, we find them in The Pickpocket of the Champs-Elysées, where cohabit – a masterful narrative trick – two distinct universes: the very bourgeois milieu of the Molyneux family, and the shady margin of Skip, a swift, dreamy thug, drifting in a paranoid mirage, a fictional underworld. How will these two worlds intersect? Skip quite simply steals Molyneux’s wedding ring, without the latter noticing: a furtive encounter of opposites, possibly destined to reproduce… In any case, the suspense remains intact in this detective chronicle of a lost Paris, where the Modiano’s spirit would cross paths with the dark irony of a Chabrol. It is no coincidence, moreover, that a film by Chabrol, The Unfaithful Wife (1969), screened at the Mac-Mahon cinema, plays a central, almost iconic role in the unfolding of the story… Jean-Hubert Gailliot thus manages to make the era he is talking regarding strangely present, as if the writer was teleported to the Paris of the summer of 1969, with his widening ties and his 5-franc notes bearing the effigy of Louis Pasteur.
Paris
It’s surprising: the novelist did not spend his childhood in Paris, of which he nevertheless seems to have kept such personal memories. “I was born there, but I never lived there for long.he explains to the “World of Books”, and continuously only at the end of the 1970s, before settling in Auch [où, en 1987, il a créé avec Sylvie Martigny les merveilleuses éditions Tristram]. It was rather a city that I passed through as a child, because my parents had friends there, while we lived in the provinces and moved often. We also went to the tourist districts that we find in the novel, the Opéra, the Champs-Elysées, whereas followingwards, when I lived there, I really walked around the city in all directions . It was a period of scarcity for me, because even before passing the baccalaureate I had left the world of my parents, who were bourgeois, even if they did not have the standing of the Molyneux…”
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