Histoires buissonnières

Description

Nadar (or Félix Tournachon for his civil status: 1820-1910) is undoubtedly known to the general public as a man with a single activity: photography. This is either forgetting or underestimating the energy of this energetic man. Nadar was a man of many passions: medicine, journalism, illustration, caricature, photography, aerial navigation and literature. In other words, Nadar was the man of his century, of an era that claimed to be one of progress, understood from the point of view of technique and invention. It was all about moving forward, experimenting. The key words? Nadar was fundamentally part of this movement. That's why Nadar was in turn a journalist, a man of letters, a caricaturist, a photographer and a balloonist. Among others, one might add. And whatever the means employed, they were all at the service of one project: the creation of a great and beautiful era. However, of all these aspects, the most overlooked is undoubtedly that of Nadar as a man of letters, although life had certainly predestined him for the small business, given that his father ran a bookshop. And how can we forget all the writers whose photographic portraits are scattered throughout Nadar's colossal collection? In this respect too, it is not without interest to note some of the dedicatees of Nadar's texts: Charles Baudelaire, Élisée Reclus, Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval and Victor Hugo, to name but five. Yes, Nadar was at the heart of the literature of his century, and he himself never stopped writing, whether fiction or essays. All these texts, written over the years and published in magazines and gazettes, were regularly collected and made into volumes such as L'Hôtellerie des coquecigrues, Le miroir aux alouettes and Sous l'incendie. And above all, in 1877, these Histoires buissonnières, an astonishing collection of short, delicate and profound prose, which Mallarmé considered to be among the finest prose poems since Baudelaire.