What remains of us is not the first work devoted to the end of the peasant world, but it is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful. That this work takes the form of a comic strip further adds to its evocation power. In these pages, Jacques Terpeant signs his most ambitious album: a pictorial work, like books of medieval hours, which retraces the life and death of rural civilization, from a little corner of the Drôme backed by the foothills of Vercors. A Testament Book. Me, Jacques Terpeant, healthy of body and spirit, bequeathed to posterity what mine transmitted to me: the biography of a line whose history stretches on a millennium.
A thousand years, this is the time that civilizations go through, before sinking inexorably. It is true from Christian peasant Europe: an epic that ends with a funeral prayer. It was there, in these places, that was born, flourished, then ended this rural civilization born around the 10th and 11th centuries, according to the great historian Fernand Braudel, when the earth and men seemed to agree for eternity, as in a painting by Jean-François Millet.
What remains of us Take place in a small village around the Saint-Martin church, in Hostun, in the Dauphiné, where monks pushed the limits of Christianity by trying and building, under the tutelage-benevolent or threatening-of the house of Hostun, which will be raised to the ducal rank by Louis XIV.
Revive the annals of an ancient world
“My family has always been here, scrupulously firing. Since the first acts of Catholicity, when we realized that we had to note those who were born, those who died, so that the memory of men did not forget them. »» It is this world that the author sweats with a filial piety that his transfigure drawing – illuminates and illuminates. As a child of the old weather, it belongs with all his fibers to this almost feudal universe governed by immutable allegiances. The line has the simplicity of the old chronicles and the old images. It is that Terpeant draws as his ancestors plowed – patiently, stubbornly, with the sacred respect for the transmitted gesture.
Jacques Terpeant draws with the sacred respect for the transmitted gesture
Outstanding illustrator and portrait painter, he is not at his first attempt. He has already crunched our great writers in Trait-Portraits, celebrated the last fires of French America with Lost captainrevisited A king without entertainment by Jean Giono, put in image the life of Louis-Ferdinand Céline in God’s dog. But it was especially through the work of Jean Raspail that he deployed all his art: Seven ridersrewarded with the Saint-Michel Prize for best drawing in 2011, then The Kingdom of Borée. Raspail had made this double signature his: “It’s terpail and rastant”he said, enthusiastic, of these adaptations.
Surprisingly, Terpeant, who has never left her native Drôme never, is nonetheless one of the most faithful heirs of Raspail. Like him, he wants to be the “Ruine Guardian”. Like him, he seeks to save the final vestiges of a overflowing world. But where the vice-consul of Patagonia tracked up the last men on the borders of the world, in the land of fire, Terpeant finds them in the countryside, among the last peasants-maneo, “I stay”. Its title, what remains of us, also resonates as the echo of one of the most unknown masterpieces in Raspail: who remembers men …
His oldest memory dates back to his 3 years. A country image from another age: a plow drawn by two oxen, “Mixture of a paint by Rosa Bonheur and a few lines of Giono”facing the Vercors which stands like a steep wall, a breathtaking citadel covered with impenetrable forests. An inhospitable nature where men have hardly conquered some arpents of land, from generation to generation. Terpete is the last link.
It is this testamentary break that he records in his book, without ever locking him up in an ethnographic perspective. He does not freeze the frescoes of a swallowed peasant pompéi, any more than he draws up the inventory of a museum of popular arts and traditions; On the contrary, it revives the annals of an ancient world which suddenly take up flesh. The eras are picked up and the destinies intertwine.
We chase the “Large boar” or foreigner at the cry of “Zauteu, Zauteu”which designates Hostun in the vernacular, both the name of the master and the name of the country, “Because we belong to the two”. It is not surprising that the album opens onto the coat of arms of Hostun’s house: a golden cross served on a vermeil background. But the first house is that of God, as the Church was obviously the stem cell of this world; And the cross, its principle of order: erected at the crossroads, emerging above the mists, cut into the sky at the height of the churches.
It is she who, the first, was established on these lands; It is from her that this civilization radiated. From there, the man was able to plant his spade there, before raising his prayer there. What remains of us is an album placed under the sign of literature, “The tragic joy of finding the lost”in the words of the writer Pascal Quignard. TERPANT registers his drawing in the wake – the groove – of the last great witnesses of the rural world, the novelists Pierre Bergounioux, Richard Millet, Pierre Jourde, Pierre Michon. Still others, older.
The fall of a civilization
But the real secrecy of TERPANT is the color. In the grand landscapes of Vercors, he found a decor to his measure. He draws them with each season, in a chromatic symphony: green, snowy, but most often in ocher tones, as in the fall of a civilization. How to capture the decline of a world? By light. To dominate the light is to dominate colors. Claude Monet devoted a work of work to it. He always painted the same landscape – a cathedral or nympheas – under different framing and iridescent lights. Paul Cézanne too.
A painter’s book and a writer painting
The Sainte-Victoire Mountain of Terpeant is the Vercors. A double permanence, stone and men, landscapes and faces, earth and the dead – in short, geology and genealogy, which are the field of swarming, both landscaper and portrait painter, as a man who painted and who portrays, inhabited by two demons: that of drawing and that of literature. The comic strip allowed him to bring the two together, leaving us with What remains of mena painter’s book and a writer painting. With pen and brush.
What remains of usJacques Terpeant, Futuropolis, 120 pages, 22 euros.
