This good earthy giant measured "1.96m", "a fathom, as we said in the Middle Ages", corrected Jean Teulé, who died on Tuesday evening October 18, at the age of 69, from cardiac arrest at the from food poisoning this weekend.
The writer of miscellaneous history—a word that suits him well, in both senses of the word, so much did he love the diversity of the world—knew everything, words from the past.
A sort of historian at least as greedy as he is learned.
An encyclopaedist of macabre or surprising anecdotes.
He was born on February 26, 1953, “like Victor Hugo and Buffalo Bill,” he said.
Not everyone was lucky enough to have communist parents, though.
His father, nicknamed "Seed of Moscow" is even fired from a job and the family comes to the Paris region where the father is a carpenter at "Humanity" and his mother, concierge at the town hall of Arcueil (Val-de- Marl).
Period of the red suburbs around Paris.
At the municipal school, his classmate was Jean-Paul Gaultier, with whom he would remain a friend, a fortune made for both of them.
In ninth grade, the kid is bottom of the class, he is directed towards car mechanics but his drawing teacher saves him.
Teulé was first a man of images more than words.
For ten years, he made a living from comic strips, the mainstay of "l'Echo des Savanes".
There are several Teulés and first for the general public that of television, which a generation discovers in "L'assiette anglaise" around Bernard Rapp on Antenne 2 from 1897 to 1989. Black shirt with white polka dots, mop of curls, the eccentric funny is 35 years old and already plays the small precision which kills: when the emission diffuses a report on a small film of atypical soil en route for Cannes, "Les sabots à rocker", he is the only one to know the origin of the expression: the seesaw is when the peasant has drunk too much to walk straight.
This carnal relationship to the popular past of the language will always be its signature.
Troublemaker of the great era of "Nowhere else", on Canal +, he made a face, a name, and very quickly a work.
An editor, Betty Mialet, captivated by his eloquence, says to him: "You are a writer but you don't know it yet".
He has every reason to believe her: it was she, with Bernard Barrault, who discovered Philippe Djian.
The latter in the blink of an eye calls Betty the heroine of “37°2 in the morning”.
Teulé will also have his own style: transforming abominable stories into bestsellers, like the "Suicide Store" and so many historical stories that step aside.
Who knew that Charles IX, the organizer of the Saint-Barthélémy massacres, had gone mad to death at the age of 22.
Renamed “Charly 9″, the novel flies away, like “Le Montespan”, the cuckolded husband of Louis XIV's favorite, whom no one has ever spoken of.
That's Teulé, take a step back, or look down from above, or rather through the little end of the lock.
This greedy approach regularly appealed to hundreds of thousands of readers - 500,000 for "Le Montespan" - but not always to purists.
In 2020, his “Crénom, Baudelaire!
still inspires in bookstores but not among critics, who sometimes find it as vulgar as it is popular.
"Free man, you'll always shit the sea", was able to have fun this lover of puns, but he also sees in Baudelaire "the first modern punk", which is well seen and irrefutable of the cynical dandy and dusts off the textbooks.
Jean Teulé made people read so much, devoting extraordinary biographies to Villon or Verlaine: do we realize how prodigious he is in the age of social networks?
Many of his novels have been adapted into comics, for the theater - a Molière for "Le Montespan" - or for the cinema, like Patrice Leconte who made the "Suicide Store" an animated film.
Jean Teulé made people read so much, devoting extraordinary biographies to Villon or Verlaine: do we realize how prodigious he is in the age of social networks?
Many of his novels have been adapted into comics, for the theater - a Molière for "Le Montespan" - or for the cinema, like Patrice Leconte who made the "Suicide Store" an animated film.
Jean Teulé made people read so much, devoting extraordinary biographies to Villon or Verlaine: do we realize how prodigious he is in the age of social networks?
Many of his novels have been adapted into comics, for the theater - a Molière for "Le Montespan" - or for the cinema, like Patrice Leconte who made the "Suicide Store" an animated film.
For twenty years, Jean Teulé lived with Miou Miou.
He had met her at his friend Jean-Pierre Coffe's during a depressive period and had not recognized her.
He said he said to her "Hello Madam", before realizing that he was facing the fantasy of his adolescence: "I told everyone when the film came out that the woman of my life was the girl waltzers”.
He was 20 years old, and it was worth waiting for his 55 years for this lightning meeting: they have not left each other since 1998. He had lost his hair but not his big blue eyes and his high verb to tell the battle of Agincourt, theme of his latest story, last January on the set of "C à vous".
It was raining and the horses were not neighing, which announced defeat.
The college dunce has made generations of French people read, passionate about history in search of a breath that smells of earth, blood, sweat and stupor.
For there were prostitutes on the battlefields not for the warrior's rest, but for his encouragement.
It was not in the Michelet, but Teulé repaired this type of omission.
His sudden death at the age of 69 will bring tears to the cottages, a word and an expression that this lover of proverbs and even revisited period clichés must have adored.
King Teulé is dead, what a tile, damn it!
You have to smile with this great living being who is no more.
It was not in the Michelet, but Teulé repaired this type of omission.
His sudden death at the age of 69 will bring tears to the cottages, a word and an expression that this lover of proverbs and even revisited period clichés must have adored.
King Teulé is dead, what a tile, damn it!
You have to smile with this great living being who is no more.
It was not in the Michelet, but Teulé repaired this type of omission.
His sudden death at the age of 69 will bring tears to the cottages, a word and an expression that this lover of proverbs and even revisited period clichés must have adored.
King Teulé is dead, what a tile, damn it!
You have to smile with this great living being who is no more.