Collection: Jacques Abeille

Jacques Abeille (1942–2022) was born in Lyon, France, the child of two parents married to other people. His father, Valentin, a member of the French Resistance, arranged for false papers (it was, in those days, impossible for parents to claim custody of children born out of wedlock) and cared for him until he was killed in action in 1944. Abeille was then adopted by his father’s identical twin brother, a high-ranking civil servant who moved him to Guadeloupe and eventually settled in Bordeaux, where the teenage Abeille briefly corresponded with André Breton. Having studied ethnology, psychology, and philosophy—which he taught for ten years—Abeille became an art teacher. He spoke of his life as a “banal provincial instructor” and family man as a way of triumphing over the eccentricity of his upbringing, though he always felt “the need to cultivate a secret garden,” which, after he abandoned painting in the 1970s, was literature. He first published erotica under the pseudonym Bartleby, meanwhile composing The Statuary Gardens, which, after a series of vicissitudes—the bankruptcy of one publisher, the loss of the only surviving typescript, the miraculous rediscovery of a copy—was published in 1982. It was the first in what would become a ten-volume series called the Cycle des Contrées—an epic of interlocking imaginary worlds.