Maurice Leblanc in Étretat (76), Seine-Maritime (76)

As a plaque shown below informs us, the author Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941) lived here at the Clos Lupin, Étretat, from 1915 until his death in 1914. In 1999 it was opened to the public by Leblanc's grand-daughter Florence. The tour is audio-guided (by Frence television's own Lupin, Georges Descrières) and is much more about Arsène Lupin and the mystery of L'Aiguille creuse than Maurice Leblanc himself: but then, look at the name of his house, where fiction takes over from reality. I let the photos tell the story, which ends with the treasure hidden in the needle, Lupin staring at it in the background.

My Maurice Leblanc posts:
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Maurice Leblanc in Étretat (76), Seine-Maritime
Maurice Leblanc L'Aiguille creuse | The Hollow Needle
Maurice Leblanc: Arsène Lupin: gentleman cambrioleur
Maurice Leblanc: Les Trois Yeux

The Cliffs, Étretat (76), Seine-Maritime (76)

The Falaise d'Aval, with its aiguille (needle) rock formation on the left made famous by Maurice Lablanc's novel L'Aiguille Creuse ('The Hollow Needle').

Looking upstream, the rock formation of La Falaise d'Amont.

And a broader view of Étretat and its coast.

Maupassant in Étretat (76), Seine-Maritime (76)

The street where Maurice Leblanc lived, and which is now an author's house, is in fact named after Guy de Maupassant.

Maupassant bought some of the land on which La Guillette stands from his mother, who had bought it for a vegetable garden. Originally Maupassant wanted to call it 'La Maison Tellier', although his mother (and some friends) strongly objected to any suggestions that it was a brothel. Instead, he adopted Hermine Lecomte de Noüy's suggestion of La Guillette. The house was eventually built in 1883, and is where the author finished 'Pierre et Jean' and wrote a large part of 'Bel Ami'.

The original figures on top of the posts were jade Chinese lions.

What we didn't realise at the time of visiting Étretat on Saturday is that the place now belongs to L’Association les amis de la Guillette, and that visits can be arranged online.

Les Jardins d'Étretat, Étretat (76), Seine-Maritime (76)

Les Jardins d'Étretat, as an attraction, are less than eighteen months old. But their history goes back to 1905, when a local landscape gardener Auguste Lecanu, with the actor Madame Thébault (of whose existence I can find nothing online), planted the first tree here on the Falaise d'Amont, within sight of the Falaise d'Aval, its Aiguille made famous by writer Maurice Leblanc's creation, the 'gentleman burglar' Arsène Lupin. Thébault's most famous role, the story goes, was as Roxelane in Soliman le magnifique, and she bought an area of land here and had a villa called Roxelane constructed. Lecanu designed the garden influenced by the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, noted for his painting Coucher de soleil à Étretat.

Much later, it was the Russians Alexandre Grivko and his friend Mark Dumas who began transforming the premises into a kind of sculpture garden. This includes Coquillage de mer by Alena Kogan; Le jardin des Etreintes et des arbres by Viktor Szostalo and Agnieszka Gradnik; Le Jardin Emotions (with its remarkable ball faces) by Samuel Salcedo; and Viktor Szostalo also created the sculpture of Monet with his easel and artwork, with the real Falaise d'Aval in the background. These are just a few photos:

Finally, a representation of Monet painting Coucher de soleil à Étretat.

Olivier Adam: Falaises | Cliffs (2005)

I know Olivier Adam has some unpopularity with literary critics, and Frédéric Beigbeder in particular has said that he has nothing against Adam – it's just his books. On reading Falaises I thought I was beginning to understand what the critics meant, but then I turned to what Olivier Adam has said about his books and changed my mind: the critics are definitely being unfair.

Falaises struck me as a deeply pessimistic novel and it would be a mistake to see Olivier's Adam's world view as not bleak, although there is light at the end of the novel. Bearing in mind his later novel Les Lisières and what I wrote about it, it's interesting to note that the word lisières (edges, frontiers, borders, etc) is mentioned several times in the novel. These could very easily apply to the edges of the self.

The family is an important element in Adam's writing: the family can of course be wonderful, be a healing influence, but also be sheer hell. Adam said of Le Cœur régulier, 'Rien n'est vrai, mais rien n'est inventé': 'Nothing is true, but nothing is invented'. People fall and try to get up again, and after the narrator's mother in Falaises – a short time after being released from a psychiatric hospital – throws herself from a cliff, the impact is profound.

Siblings different and similar, family problems, leaving home, despair, drug taking and severe abuse of alcohol to escape the hell of reality, casual sex, suicide, violence, all present here and all usual in Olivier Adam novels.

My other posts on Olivier Adam:

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Olivier Adam: Je vais bien, ne t'en fais pas
Olivier Adam: Des vents contraires
Olivier Adam: Le Cœur régulier
Olivier Adam: Les Lisières
Olivier Adam: À l'abri de rien

Maurice Leblanc L'Aiguille creuse | The Hollow Needle: (1909)

Crime novels are far from my staple literary diet, although a short time ago I read Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin Gentleman Cambrioleur and was impressed. With a few reservations, I'm impressed with L'Aiguille Creuse (The Hollow Needle) too.

L'Aiguille Creuse is largely set in the Pays de Caux in Normandy, which can – as Leblanc describes it – be fairly accurately located in the triangular area between Le Havre, Dieppe and Rouen, with the north being the coastal strip between Le Havre and Dieppe, the south being the River Seine between Le Havre and Rouen, and to the east the valleys between Dieppe and Rouen.

Without going too much into the wildly unbelievable story – which includes murders, mistaken identity, obsessive sleuthing, incredible coincidences by the bucketful (no exaggeration), nail-biting chases and an ineffectual, Spoonerised Sherlock Holmes (as Herlock Sholmès) – L'Aiguille Creuse is essentially a battle of wits between Lupin and Isidore Beautrelet.

Lupin is a highly intelligent burglar and a kind of anarchistic would-be aristocrat – in the end he'd like to be remembered by having rooms in the Louvre named after him for instance – and Beautrelet is a fantastically gifted seventeen-year-old student of rhetoric at a lycée who is more a match for Lupin, who two thirds of the way through has to confess that the 'Bébé' is much more dangerous to his success as a thief than the inept police chief Ganimard or the bungling English dick Sholmès.

Fortunes swing to and fro for the two main characters here, and Beautrelet goes from hero for saving his father and Raymonde de Saint-Véran from the amorous clutches of Lupin – as well as discovering that L'Aiguille creuse is the château de L'Aiguille in the département of Creuse – to cry-baby when he finds that Lupin is one step ahead and knows that the château is a red herring netted by none other than Louis XIV. And then, when Beautrelet works out that the real Aiguille creuse is in fact the hollowed rock formation off the coast of Étretat* (incidentally the town where Leblanc used to live), he is shocked to learn that Lupin (using another identity) has in fact married Raymonde.

Lupin's fortunes swing too – not only is he upstaged by a schoolboy upstart, not only does he have to give up his luxury home in the hollow needle surrounded by kings' treasures and priceless paintings by old masters, but Sholmès shoots his beloved wife dead.

Maybe I just felt in the mood for a little light reading but – in spite of the old-fashioned-sounding words ('diable !', 'damnation !', 'gredin' ('rascal')), etc, instead of more modern words like 'putain', 'connard', and so on, I was quite surprised how fresh a lot of this seems, how crazy, and well, how enjoyable. I won't be turning Lupin into a reading habit, but all the same Leblanc a very good writer...

*No, it's not hollow in real life.

My Maurice Leblanc posts:
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Maurice Leblanc in Étretat (76), Seine-Maritime
Maurice Leblanc L'Aiguille creuse | The Hollow Needle
Maurice Leblanc: Arsène Lupin: gentleman cambrioleur
Maurice Leblanc: Les Trois Yeux