ABSTRACT
There is a sense in which the potboilers and the serious writing are of one piece. The volume of Poitou tales displays Jean-Louis Cordebard's fascination with the darker elements of French history, with fables, with rare words and archaic syntax. None other than Leo Lenvers pinpoints the deepest movement in Cordebard's writing. Cordebard's oblique and playful announcement of a self-exhibition that is both sexual and psychological already points to the dialectics of farce and fragility that run through not only this disturbing book but indeed Cordebard's bizarre oeuvre as a whole. The chapter explores if the lure of salvation through writing perhaps ultimately becomes, for Cordebard, a final illusion that should be discarded, this time in favor of living fully during whatever years were left to him. When Cordebard was working for the Ministry of Culture in Nantes, he had visited the ruins of Gilles de Rais's notorious castle in Champtoce.
