An Irish Diary

‘The Immortal’ – An Irishwoman’s Diary about French writer Michel Déon and Ireland

Michel Déon at his home in Tynagh, Co Galway, in 2000. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy

Lara Marlowe's face
Lara Marlowe
Thu Apr 20 2017 - 00:01

Not for nothing are members of the Académie française known as "les immortels". Michel Déon, the French academician who died in Galway last December 28th at the age of 97, wanted what is perhaps the best form of immortality, for his oeuvre to be remembered.

On April 25th, Déon’s family and friends will hold a day-long homage to him at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and at the Cúirt Literary Festival. Galway’s mayor, Noel Larkin, Jim Browne, the president of NUI Galway, and Jean-Pierre Thébault, France’s ambassador to Ireland, will participate.

Déon’s memory will be further preserved through the Prix Michel Déon, to be awarded on alternate years to French and Irish writers, beginning in 2019, the centenary of his birth.

Déon and his widow Chantal settled decades ago in Tynagh, Co Galway. At his funeral Mass there on January 2nd, Jane Conroy, the retired head of the French department at NUIG, realised how close the French couple were to villagers. “You need humour to really fit in Ireland,” she explains. “Michel had that, and he liked conversation.”

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Déon gave 7,000 books to the NUIG library. He held the honorary position of adjunct professor of French in the 1990s.

“One of our best students told me the most valuable day was when Michel Déon came and talked about being a writer, about what literature meant to him,” Conroy recalls. “It was one of those moments in a student’s life when things fall into place.”

The author Pierre Joannon, Ireland’s consul general on the Côte d’Azur, was given Irish citizenship in recognition of his contribution to Ireland. Joannon has been called “the most Irish of Frenchmen and the most French of Irishmen”.

Joannon says his decades-long friendship with Déon was “rooted in our shared love of Ireland”, the subject of at least half of the more than 400 letters they exchanged since the 1970s.

“Michel needed peace and quiet in a country whose soul was compatible with his own,” Joannon says.

"He preferred keeping France at a distance. When he was elected to the Académie française, it restored his privileged tie with France. To me, Michel was the great intercessor between France and Ireland. If he hadn't loved Ireland, he wouldn't have stayed more than 40 years."

One of Déon's last wishes was to see an English translation of Horseman, Pass By!, his tribute to Ireland. The book will be launched at NUIG on the 25th, in the presence of translator Clíona Ní Ríordáin.

In The Purple Taxi, published in 1973, Déon painted a romantic picture of Connemara. The book won the Grand Prix de l'Académie Française, and the film version, starring Charlotte Rampling, Peter Ustinov, Fred Astaire and Philippe Noiret, became a French cinema classic. It will be shown at An Taibhdhearc as part of the day of homage.

"The Purple Taxi is one of the really beautiful novels about Ireland in the second half of the 20th century," says Frédéric Vitoux, who was inducted into the Académie française by Déon.

Vitoux will read from his most recent book, about the Paris literary café Les Mariniers, at the Cúirt Festival on the 25th.

I asked Vitoux what draws Frenchmen like Déon, Joannon and himself to Ireland. "To my mind, the Irish are the Latins of the English-speaking and Celtic world, because of their exhuberance, their art de vivre, a certain kind of disorder..." he says.

Like Déon before him, Vitoux is fascinated by James Joyce, “the guiding light, perhaps the greatest writer... it’s not by chance Joyce was borne up by France.”

Like Joyce, Déon "needed to be apart from his compatriots", Vitoux continues. "He always had an independent, rebellious streak, like many Irish writers. But he remained quintessentially French. His love of the language and literature, and his generosity to French writers, gave full meaning to his membership in the Académie française."

The last two books Déon gave Conroy were about the Comte d'Avaux, Louis XIV's ambassador to Ireland, and The Poetry of Celtic Races, by the 19th-century historian Ernest Renan.

“I got a sense of Michel pondering the significance of his place as a Frenchman in Ireland. He also had this Mediterranean, Greek soul,” Conroy says.

Before Ireland, the Déons lived on the Greek island of Spetsai. “He was Greek and Irish and French, but above all French,” Conroy continues. “He was doing that French thing of trying to get to the bottom of things and understand how it all fits together. He was thinking about European civilisation.”

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