Bernard Marcotte
Bernard Marcotte (5 July 1887 – 4 July 1927) was a French writer of the beginning of the 20th century.
Contents
Biography
Bernard Marcotte was born at Saint-Germainmont, in the Ardennes department. After studying in Charleville, he came to Paris to prepare for the entrance exam to the École normale supérieure. He did not take the exam, but graduated in philosophy (1910). However, he was too attracted to literature, poetry in particular, and had too independent a temperament to accept the path of teaching. He then passed a competitive examination to become editor-in-chief at the Ministry of Public Works (1911), a job that gave him time to write for himself.
From that time on, he was in contact with a whole literary and intellectual milieu: Jean Wahl, Paul Tuffrau, André Ruplinger, Henri Morel, Georges Pancol, René Bichet, Roger Dévigne, the actor Louis Jouvet, and the sculptor André Juin.
He wrote poems, some of which were published in magazines: La Foire aux Chimères (a magazine founded in 1907 with André Colomer, Roger Dévigne, Gabriel-Tristan Franconi), Les Poèmes, Les Actes des poètes; tales... In these different texts, all his sensibility, his dreamy spirit, his great culture, but also his fantasy, are revealed, as well as his philosophic questionings, which Marcotte will bring together in the texts he will write after the war: Les Cahiers d'Esop.
In July 1908, Le Moulin des Chimères, a one-act play, was performed by Louis Jouvet (in the role of Don Quixote) at the Folk high school situated at Faubourg-Saint-Antoine street, with the Groupe d'Action d'Art.
Bernard Marcotte is one of the characters represented by Lucien Jonas in his 1909 painting entitled The Poets.
He returned regularly to his Ardennes home, Gespunsart, where he enjoyed walking in the forests and valleys along the Semoy and Meuse rivers.
His literary activity was abruptly interrupted by World War I, during which he was wounded three times. He would continue to write after returning from the front, but in very different conditions. During his lifetime, Marcotte was able to publish only one book: the novella Les Fantaisies Bergamasques (1913). He died in 1927, after eight years in military hospitals, as a result of one of his wounds and the conditions of life in the trenches.[1] He was recognized as having "died for France".[2]
Notes
- ↑ Bernard Marcotte was buried in Prix-lès-Mézières, where his father, André Marcotte, born on October 16, 1854 in this city, had himself been buried, after his sudden death on February 6, 1912 in Gespunsart where he was tax collector.
- ↑ The mention "Died for France" was attributed by the National Office for Veterans and Victims of War on May 12, 2021: decision N° 2021–120, file n° 13799.
References
- Arbour, Roméo (1956). Les Revues Littéraires Éphémères Paraissant à Paris entre 1900 et 1914. Paris: Librairie José Corti.
- Carré, Jean-Marie (1914). "Bernard Marcotte – Les Fantaisies Bergamasques," Revue d'Ardenne et d'Argonne, No. 5/6, pp. 177–79.
- Dévigne, Roger (2007). "Lyres et Soucoupes. Quelques Mots sur le Passé et le Présent des Cafés Poétiques," L'Œil bleu, No. 3, pp. 15–22.
- Tuffrau, Paul (2010). "Souvenirs sur Bernard Marcotte," L'Œil bleu, No. 10, pp. 13–38.
- Tuffrau, Paul (2017). Passage d'Ariel. Bernard Marcotte, Poète, Conteur et Philosophe de l'Ironie. HDiffusion.
