Adresses fantômes

It is no longer typical in our time to stroll without being pushed by time, to wander to the rhythm of encounters and fate. Yet it is the attitude Michel Longuet has adopted in his quest to follow the footsteps of sacred characters such as Méliès, Beckett or Calder. Equipped with his erudition, his notebook and his pen, he looks for number 13, rue Laffitte, where Gauguin worked, the gate to the workshop of Toulouse-Lautrec on rue Frochot, or Jean Follain’s bombed house in Saint-Lô. The result is a book illustrated like an aesthetic tracking, combining drawings, notes and comments collected according to a search for what is unusual and wonderful. To follow Méliès for example, the author goes close to a candy plant in Montreuil while the Albert Marquet ‘path’ put him into contact with the owners of the apartments where the painter lived, and he discovered in doing so that each one of them was systematically on the fifth floor.

• Adresses fantômes, by Michel Longuet, Grasset, 2013, 112 p., €18.50.