The Eye of INA: discovering Nick Verlaine, Arsène Lupine's wacky cousin

The return of Arsène Lupine, immortalized on television in the 1970s by Georges Descrières and today by Omar Sy, is an opportunity, via Madelen, to redress an injustice: the absence of Nick Verlaine, in the encyclopedias telling the history of the series.

Its arrival on small screens dates back to 1976. That year, the first channel decided to broadcast, for the first time, a summer series.

However, it has nothing to do with the summer sagas of the 90s. Anxious to "

" Thursday evenings, the channel management offers six episodes in which the hero is presented as a "

" of the gentleman burglar.

Under the pseudonym of Nick Verlaine, hides a real estate agent who is called, in reality, Nicolas Rimbaud.

The tone is set.

Behind the discreet, serious and peaceful man, there is a thief whose goal is to commit the most insane thefts, for the pleasure, rather than for the money.

His vocation was born at the age of ten months, when he stole his nurse's pacifier.

Since entering adulthood, his absolute dream has been to steal the Eiffel Tower.

While waiting to achieve this, he will divert a national road and the course of the Garonne, as well as the sleeping car of the “Paris-Côte d'Azur” train, in order to seduce a lyric singer who will become his wife.

Her face-to-face with the Loch Ness Monster, who left Scotland for Auvergne, precedes a meeting with a young hitchhiker, who is actually an alien from Uranus.

For the critics, the whole is inspired by

, then at the head of the audiences, with a touch of surrealism.

"

Wink your eye with me,

then recounts Philippe Nicaud, who admits having had a lot of fun playing the antithesis of Inspector Leclerc who, at the start of the 1960s, enabled him to become a star of a small screen still in black and white.

Grandiloquent adventure

Pol Quentin is at the origin of this mini-series.

Translator and adapter of foreign plays, he created Nick Verlaine inspired by Nick Velvet, hero of short stories imagined by an American novelist, Edward E. Hoch and published in

, a monthly specializing in detective stories.

Dialogued by François Boyer, the ensemble is produced by Claude Boissol who, for the occasion, chooses an unusual cast in the image of the project.

Maurice Biraud, in the role of a gangster named Prosper, rubs shoulders with the clown Achille Zavatta and Anna Prucnal.

The Polish singer breaks her image as an intellectual performer, by playing a delirious singer, dreaming of becoming the new Bianca Castafiore.

The success is unfortunately not at the rendezvous.

The viewers adhere so little to these crazy adventures that the last episode,

is canceled in disaster.

Times have changed and the ensemble today deserves a new broadcast.

It would allow us to breathe, with a certain nostalgia, that air of fantasy and freedom that we really need.

Find here the series "Nick Verlaine or How to fly the Eiffel Tower".

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