Just as there are man-orchestras, men-feathers, and more rarely human bombs, the harlequin men with their variegated and mismatched coats are there, but rarer, more singular or discreet. Sébastien Lapaque is part of this last caste with scattered motifs. By rewarding the writer with thirty published volumes, journalist for Le Figaro littéraire for more than a quarter of a century, the academicians have also crowned, through The Rappel of the Birds (Actes Sud), a long career as a writer as original as it is surprising, with multiple side roads, escapes free of all obstacles, bushes taking him where he was least expected. Had he not stated in his counter-journal, Autre et encore, published in 2013, still by Actes Sud, his faithful publisher: “Life is only beautiful when it is complicated, fraught with chances and risks, dreams, violence, madness. Without forgetting his annoyances and his inadequacies”?
Thus, this Rappel des oiseaux, with a title inspired by a playful and warbling piece for harpsichord by Jean-Philippe Rameau. There, over 280 pages, this lover of eternal France, good wine and gastronomy, slayer of right-thinking and neoliberalism, offers us, in 33 paintings, a “meditation on hope, friendship and the transfiguration of a life”, which leads the protagonist, Noah, in the footsteps of Francis of Assisi, the “Poverello” that he had previously directed, in 2008, in Sermon of Saint Francis of Assisi to the birds and the rockets. Here is what Lapaque writes about the singing birds, in his Rappel des oiseaux: “Since their childhood, we have accompanied the characters of this book with our colorful blessing, passing with them from fear to joy, from anguish to faith, from chirping to cries of alarm. We birds, with our vibrant trills, with no other office than that of the dawning light, no other service than praising the stars. »
From Sébastien Lapaque, we know the taste for more or less distant spaces, first and foremost, Brazil, his second cradle, to which he devoted several books since Under the sun of exile, Georges Bernanos in Brazil (1938-1945), published in 2002, and Algeria, land of his dear Saint Augustine (Théorie d'Alger, Le Rappel des oiseaux, where he invited the specters of the monks Trappists of Tibéhirine, brutally murdered), without forgetting the Italy of churches and chapels and the land of France.
As for his admiration, the pantheon has long been occupied by Georges Bernanos (“the writer with powerful visionary gifts”) and Stefan Zweig, the nostalgic cosmopolitan, melancholy cantor of “yesterday’s world”, the one before plague-brown or blood-red totalitarianism. “We cannot imagine two men more different than Bernanos and Zweig,” he emphasized. One was made of strength and flame, of passion and rapture, like thunder that burst into sentences resembling lightning. » Adding to this tandem, and in disorder: Pier Paolo Pasolini (with a predilection for Oil), Madame de Sévigné, Bossuet, the champion of situationism Guy Debord, the atrabilaire refractory Philippe Muray, Pierre Boutang, Simon Leys, Rabelais, Pascal, Paul-Jean Toulet, Pessoa with a thousand faces. Without forgetting the exile from Douarnenez with “paste papers” and “blue poems”, Georges Perros, the bard Xavier Grall and Robert Giraud, the one from Vin des rue and L’Argot des bistrots, which he had prefaced.
In a pendulum movement, after Short equinoctial journey. Brazilian notebooks and Georges Bernanos once again, this adopted Versailles resident makes the reappearance in 2024, at the end of an investigation as fascinating as it is stubborn, Zweig and Bernanos, who had met briefly in Brazil, in Barbacena, in January 1942, a few days before the voluntary death of the Austrian novelist. On one side “the wandering Catholic, guardian of honor lost in the age of machines” and Stefan Zweig, “the humanist, skeptical and democratic Jew”. This meeting inspired Échec et mate au paradis, awarded the Renaudot prize for the essay. A book praised in the columns of Le Figaro littéraire, where we could read: “You will discover an extraordinarily sensitive and extraordinarily skillful writer, that is to say a complete novelist, as we say of an athlete, because, with him, intuition and craft are balanced in perfect mastery, and, as we say of a show, because he knows how to touch both our heart and our imagination, playing virtuoso on the entire palette of our emotions: the tenderness and fear, melancholy and wonder, joy and pity. »
Almost no genre is foreign to him for this curious man born in 1971 in Germany, in Tübingen: novel (The Convergence of the Trade Winds, This world is so beautiful, winner of the Jean-Freustié prize), essay (Sermon of Saint Thomas Aquinas to children and robots, We will have drunk everything), short story (French mythology, crowned in 2002 by the Goncourt prize for short stories), logbook, travel diary, portrait. Facta et verba, as the Latins said.
Without doubt, it is in the notebook that he fully expresses his thirst for freedom and at best, his inclination as a homo liber for truant and uninhibited evocations, not to mention the fun and laughter. We see it when reading Autrement or, where he cheerfully summons Georges Simenon to the skinned Daniel Darc, ex-singer of Taxi Girl, passing through the pillars and three-quarters of the Six Nations Tournament, not to mention the Halles de Rungis frequented from early on or, more unexpectedly, the lysergic paths of Kathmandu. And of course France, his France, defined as follows: “It’s Jeannot Lapin and Bibi Fricotin, it’s Ronsard, Hugo and Aragon, the Loire which has its source at Mont Gerbier-de-Jonc, it’s the song of the language, glory and faith…”.
So here, on this Thursday, October 29, 2026, is his new crowned work, which bears as an epigraph this confession from the Lithuanian poet and French-speaking visionary Oscar Milosz (1877-1939): “There are only birds, children and saints who are interesting. » As for the title, The Rappel of the Birds, it refers us to that of his very first novel, written at the age of 27, and published in 1998, Les Barricades mysteriouses, a title inspired by a piece for harpsichord – a superb rondeau – by another magnificent baroque artist, François Couperin.
