9 June 2016

Lourmarin Cemetery #1: Christian Gabriel/le Guez Ricord

I hadn't heard of the poet Christian Gabriel/le Guez Ricord,, and would still be ignorant of his existence if it hadn't been for an inked in addition near the cemetery entrance indicating the existence of his grave here: to clarify, Ricord used 'Gabriel' in both the male and the female forms. Struck by voices and visions, he was hospitalised on several occasions, and wrote Du  Fou au Bateleur in collaboration with the psychiatrist Jean-Pierre Coudray. Guez Ricord, as the  French Wikipédia entry suggests, was something of a fin de siècle poète maudit, born in Marseille, where he died. The poet Bernar Mialet was his executor. Ricord's a kind of cross between Gérard de Nerval and Antonin Artaud. I have at present no way of verifying this, and although I treat anything from Wikipedia with great caution, the scholarly Le Matricule des anges revue does mention the strong influence of Nerval on him.

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