Mes Pas Vont Ailleurs Femina Essai 2017

MY FOOTSTEPS LEAD ELSEWHERE By Jean-Luc Coatalem Who was Victor Segalen? The bulk of this writer-travellers' work is unfinished and he disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Jean-Luc Coatalem takes us with him as he tracks down Segalen from China's Forbidden City to the forests of Brittany. May 1919. Victor Segalen is found lying dead in a small wood in Brittany. Starting with the mystery surrounding Segalen's death - suicide? Accident? - Jean-Luc Coatalem traces the writer-traveller's journeys. Soldier, sailor, poet, author of a labyrinthine body of work that no one knew even existed in his own life time. In 1903, Segalen followed pilgrim-like in Gauguin's footsteps on a trip to the Marquesas Islands. In 1905, it was Djibouti, emulating Rimbaud. In 1910, he ventured into the maze of Peking's Forbidden City, following a seductive young man who was a spy and the empress's lover. He died at the age of forty-one in the lengendary Huelgoat forest, with a copy of Hamlet in his hand, a deep cut in one leg, perched above a chasm, far from his wife and the other woman he loved. Jean-Luc Coatalem is a writer and co-editor-in-chief of Géo magazine. His notable books to date include Je suis dans les mers du Sud (Grasset, 2001), an essay on Paul Gauguin, winner of the Prix des Deux Magots and the Prix Bretagne, and more recently Fortune de mer (Stock, 2014).