But these three works, enchanting as they are, are all we have of Augiéras in English. His other works—and letters, too—are well worth our attention. Among these are Le vieillard et l’enfant (The Old Man and the Child), Augiéras’s first book, a scandalous semiautobiographical tale which enraptured André Gide and was originally published by Pierre Fanlac in 1949; La chasse fantastique (The Wild Hunt), an unfinished poetic text by Augiéras and his friend Paul Placet, published posthumously by Éditions Phalène in 1984; and Domme ou l’essai d’occupation (Domme, or An Attempt at Occupation), the author’s final book and masterpiece, a record of the hermit’s life and thought amid the cliffs and crystal caves surrounding the French town of Domme, published posthumously by Éditions Fata Morgana in 1982.
Still other works by Augiéras include Une adolescence au temps du Maréchal et de multiples aventures (An Adolescence in the Age of the Marshal and Multiple Adventures), published by Christian Bourgois in 1968, and three more books published posthumously by Éditions Fata Morgana: Les noces avec l’Occident (Wedding with the West) in 1981, as well as Les barbares d’Occident (Barbarians of the West) and Prisonnier de mes rêves (Prisoner of My Dreams) in 1990. His letters to Paul Placet were published by Éditions Fanlac in 2000; those addressed to Jean Chalon were published by La Différence in 2002. Augiéras was also an accomplished painter.
Taken together, Augiéras’s œuvre amounts to a pagan gospel, a paean to nature which stresses the unity of spirit and flesh, celebrates homosexuality, and makes the case for a hermetic life—and its attendant revolution in individual consciousness—in an era overburdened with ideologies of collectivism and materialism.
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François Augiéras was born in 1925 in Rochester, New York. His father, who emigrated from France to become a piano teacher at the Eastman School of Music, had recently died of acute appendicitis. Shortly after his birth, his mother brought him home to Paris, where he grew up. At eight he left for Périgueux in the Dordogne, whose landscape would enchant him all his life. But World War II, which broke out when Augiéras was fourteen, meant he would come of age in Vichy France under the régime of Marshal Philippe Pétain.
Eager to surround himself with boys his age and to turn his back on Catholic and French culture, Augiéras joined at sixteen la Jeunesse de France et d’Outre-Mer (JFOM), a Pétainist youth movement which appealed to his neo-pagan and Germanic interests. At the same time, he enrolled in la Société périgourdine d’éducation sportive (SPES), a scouting organization which allowed him to explore the woods and camp beneath the stars. Soon afterward, he became part of a theatre troupe, and then another youth organization, the Compagnons de France. He chronicles this time in Une adolescence au temps du Maréchal, a work of historical as well as autobiographical significance. At nineteen he enlisted in the French navy and was sent to Algiers.
Then, when his service had ended and after spending time at a Trappist monastery, Augiéras visited his uncle Marcel, a retired colonel living in a bordj in El Goléa in the south of Algeria. The two began an incestuous relationship.
An insufferable man, the old colonel was also a fascinating character. He maintained a museum on his property containing a wealth of ancient artifacts and his own hunting trophies, including twenty-two buffaloes (whence its name: “Buffalo Bordj”). The bizarre affair would inspire Augiéras’s first novel, Le vieillard et l’enfant, which fell into the hands of André Gide, who was enchanted by the tale and wrote to Augiéras upon learning his identity to praise him and request a copy. Albert Camus, in fact, would lend Gide his.
Le vieillard et l’enfant, published in three parts in 1949 and in its entirety in 1950 under the pseudonym Abdallah Chaanba (Chaamba in later editions), documents the avuncular and sadomasochistic relationship between the colonel and Abdallah, who fills notebooks with the details of his life at the colonel’s bordj. This notebook-keeping is as much a mode of self-invention as it is of self-discovery, for writing behind the invented persona of Abdallah seems to free Augiéras to invent his own origin myth. He is quite conscious that the initiation into matters of love he’s received from the colonel has become part not only of his personal story but also of the story that will launch his literary career:
My carnets, I will put them in the mail; at random; across Asia, Europe, Oceania; and I will dance in the valleys of stone.He prophesies: “This man who knows nothing will survive only in my humble carnets; he whose pride went so high that he built a mausoleum during his lifetime, he will owe everything to a child who can barely write.” In one of many allusions to the Bible, Abdallah then references Jacob’s wrestling with the angel and proclaims himself “the victor,” thus identifying himself as the hero—and not the victim—of his own story.
The blue and black clouds. O, the eternal victory of little books that ruin the glory of Conquerors.
This theme, of victory through struggle, pervades Augiéras’s writing. Abdallah delights in the power the written word gives him over the abusive colonel, asserting that “nothing will remain of him, nothing of his museum, except that which I’ve rescued from eternal oblivion in my colored carnets, ochre, blue and red, shipped off from the desert in secret.” And so Abdallah’s nightly suffering takes on new meaning in the morning: “When I wake, by happy accident before the dawn . . . I do not know if my pain is not the most delirious victory cry invented under the starry sky.”
Augiéras has Abdallah end his tale by reaffirming his desire “to speak with my soul” and “to write underneath the last stars and before the Eternal, my sole Lord and my Judge.” By professing fealty to the Eternal, rather than to the possessive colonel, he has freed himself to act in accordance with his highest impulses. In seeking first to know himself and then to author his own story, Abdallah transcends his suffering and emerges as a fully developed personality.
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Further emboldened by a meeting with the aging André Gide—and never at a loss for inspiration amid his constant wandering—Augiéras continued to draw from his time in North Africa with the little booklet Zirara, published in 1958 by the literary review Structure, and the novel Le voyage des morts, published in 1959 by La Nef de Paris Éditions. There, too, he treated themes of nomadism and homosexuality and rejected Judeo-Christian religion and morality; the book’s title is a reference to the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Like Le vieillard et l’enfant, both Zirara and Le voyage des morts bore the pseudonym Abdallah Chaamba and were written in a more or less autobiographical mode.
This was to change with his next work, L’apprenti sorcier, a sublime pagan picaresque and ode to young forbidden love. In this slim book, published anonymously by Éditions Julliard in 1964, we find Augiéras’s ideas distilled into their most fabular form. The narrator, a sixteen-year-old boy, is sent by his parents to live with a priest in Périgord who travels the countryside conducting his ministry by day and abusing the boy in the evening. He’s whipped and kissed and then harangued by this dark priest, who also seems to dabble in strange magic.
While the priest is away, the protagonist befriends a boy who delivers loaves of bread on his bicycle. The early title of the work, emphasizing the central importance of this figure, was Le petit porteur de pain (The Little Bread-Bringer). They flirt and fall for one another, and in scenes set in dank caves discover love. This epicene bread-bringer is the unmistakable archetype of the beautiful boy which we see again and again in Augiéras’s work. He is a vision of perfection, ever fleeting.
Unfortunately, word gets around. The priest confronts the boy about his trysts with the bread-bringer, who is twelve years of age; people in town are enraged by the salacious character of the affair and the law is alerted. And then, by means of ancient magic, the boy—who is, of course, the sorcerer’s apprentice—hides his soul in a pool, protecting him from harm until a trial before a judge ends in his favor.
As real and relevant as the public opprobrium, gossip, and legal threats of the finale strike us today (they were partly inspired by the author’s own reputation in Périgord in the late 1950s), the great heart of the book is concerned with contrasting the sadistic priest’s abuse of the boy with the boy’s love for the angelic young bread-bringer. In the end, however, it is society who sanctions the priest and entrusts children to his charge, failing to see how the priest (and the hypocritical morality he represents) betrays that trust. Society is quick to fault the teenage protagonist, meanwhile, for loving another (and equally eager) male youth.
Needless to say, the boy feels no remorse for his actions; Augiéras characterizes them as honorable, vital, and ennobling, advancing a pagan morality in place of a Judeo-Christian one. Indeed, he locates elements of paganism within Christianity. At one point, the boy seeks shelter from the casual violence of a summer storm within a church, of which he observes: “Everything here spoke to a ferocious desire to assert the scandalous opinion that Man was made for Man, and not for Woman.” That the church which would prohibit homosexuality was continually subverting itself in this prohibition was an irony not lost on Augiéras.
The novel is perhaps Augiéras’s best. Next he would put out Une adolescence au temps du Maréchal (Christian Bourgois, 1968), the first work to be published under his own name, followed by Un voyage au Mont Athos (Flammarion, 1970), inspired by his sojourns with the Orthodox monks of that holy mountain sanctuary in Greece. But he was constantly searching for a bread-bringer-like figure to chase and to extol.
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In La chasse fantastique, written with Paul Placet over the course of ten days spent in Diré in 1959, Augiéras writes of hunting for “a being to love” and finding his quarry in—of course—another teenage boy. Biographer Serge Sanchez, author of François Augiéras: Le dernier primitif (Éditions Grasset, 2006), calls the text a “fable of bewitching poetry” which can be thought of as a “‘written fresco,’ an extension in the middle of the twentieth century of the wonders of Lascaux or Combarelles.”
Indeed, the work takes its name from an ancient European hunting myth, and its scenes unfold like a sequence of cave paintings: the speaker with his “javelins in hand” pursues the youth; he tracks him down; they wrestle; the speaker wins; they have tea; the speaker wakes to find him gone and must pursue him once again. And so on.
Augiéras identifies within this archetypal boy “a divine perfection, a new wisdom which I wanted to violently overtake me.” He continues: “A hunter at heart, I would have liked, tearing his chest, to drink the blood of this god.” Though the image is violent, the sentiment is tender; what he seeks is true communion. One is reminded of the title of Rimbaud’s lost work, La chasse spirituelle (The Spiritual Hunt). The boy is a figure of revelation and resurrection, more primitive yet more advanced than Man. He promises a better world to come. Augiéras writes:
There was in him the perfection of the new world that I saw being born on the ruins of a bygone past, a virginity and probably an unknown intelligence, a strange smile. While Destruction had suddenly aged me, well before my thirties, this teenager seemed like life reborn perfectly intact, rich with sap. He deserved to be adored as a god. In fact, after the time of men I knew no longer where began, where ended the divine.This state, of being unable to discern the beginning and end of the divine, was one to which Augiéras aspired. To the extent he was able to reach it, he did so through meditation and the pursuit of a beloved ideal. Much like the hunt itself, however, La chasse remained unfinished. The final pages of the manuscript are torn; the fable ends mid-sentence.
Its themes, however, including that of establishing a “new world” in place of what Augiéras judged to be our ruined age, would find their fullest evocation in his final work, written just two years before his death, Domme ou l’essai d’occupation.
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In 1969, Augiéras was meant to convalesce at a hospice in Domme. He had recently suffered a heart attack, and his health was deteriorating. Nevertheless, he could not bear to be cooped up at the hospice among the nuns. He stole candles from the altar of the Virgin and sought out a cliffside cave in which he built a fire, meditated, drank tea, and dried nettles to smoke for their weakly intoxicating properties. Outside he searched for large white blocks of stone to build an altar to the Universe.
It is astonishing to think that nearly four hundred thousand kilometers away, Neil Armstrong would soon be walking on the moon; Augiéras, meanwhile, made his attempt at Occupation, installing himself in the crystal caves of Domme and practicing his personal religion. Drawn to what he called the “telluric forces” emanating from the caves’ vast network of crystal formations, he meditated among them and seemed to leave his body for long stretches of time. The cave he called the Royal Chamber was especially conducive to visions of floating in an ageless ocean.
Representatives of society—the nuns, the town mayor, who warns him to “keep quiet in Domme,” the gendarme who stops him and finds him in possession of the Bardo Thödol—all believed him to be insane. Indeed, Domme opens with the results of an electroencephalogram Augiéras had been ordered to undergo in which his doctor explains that although the writer did exhibit signs of “unknown psychic activity,” such activity did not justify his involuntary commitment.
Having been subjected to unwelcome psychiatric evaluations, especially given his unconventional “tastes and tendencies,” it is a small wonder, then, why Augiéras wished to escape humanity and lead a hermetic life dedicated to worshipping the Divine Universe. “Their civilization is not Ours,” he writes. “I shall live in Domme as we live Elsewhere, I will practice Our religion secretly, without taking account of the consent of Man, whose tastes, trends, and opinions are perfectly foreign to Us.” In rejecting the dogmas and dominant modes of living of his age and not only positing but acting out a liveable alternative, Augiéras became his own guru.
He prophesied the emergence of “a new human type,” one still “deeply religious” but unconstrained by the strictures of Judeo-Christianity and thus able to truly revolutionize life, love, and consciousness on the individual level. Doubtless this line of thinking was influenced by Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch and his critique of religion and morality. “When one speaks of Christian sexual taboos and the various prohibitions [Christianity] has invented due to its fundamentally neurotic nature, joined to its affiliation with puritan Hebraic thought,” Augiéras writes in Domme, “one thinks of its contempt for women, of its condemnation of the love of boys.” But at the bottom of the faith’s repressive character lies a denial of the world itself. “The most serious Judeo-Christian sexual prohibition is this: thou shalt not have amorous relations with the Forces of the World, thou shalt not love the Universe!”
Augiéras dedicated his life and his Occupation of Domme to flouting this spirit of prohibition, though he warned of the consequences of doing so. “The return to an almost divine state comes with a price,” he writes, for union with the Universe “requires a total disengagement, an entire abandonment, a loss of all identity.” Such a requirement further distinguishes his project from Christianity, with its “stupid spirit of infantile fraternity” which “has replaced the ancient despair and loneliness that led to the Light.” His months of “solitude, hunger, and cold” are thus “a public insult to the present Christianity.” There is, of course, a logic to this sacrifice: in isolation and submission to the elements and in relinquishing identity he is “at peace, in the heart of the supreme silence,” where he is able to
see the Eternal Light, and contemplate You, Ocean of Clarity, reservoir of all life, deep cistern where resounds the primordial sound, builder and destroyer of Worlds! Resplendent gold, prime essence of non-duality, Divine Crystal in me! Joy, oh joy!This description of spiritual ecstasy reveals why a person in pursuit of meaning might choose to live as Augiéras did during his Occupation of the crystal caves of Domme.
Later in the book, Augiéras decides to sit in public view upon the meadow before the Porte des Combes, one of Domme’s ancient gates. There, while meditating in the sun, he sees a young boy who takes notice of him as well. One day, the child approaches, places a bundle of flowers before him, kisses his feet, and then leaves wordlessly.
Augiéras writes of remaining motionless during this exchange, as one might do with a wild animal, lest it flee. One thinks of the elusive beautiful boy in La chasse fantastique. The child later speaks to Augiéras and asks him simple questions, such as whether Augiéras is “very old,” which he answers in the negative. Then he asks, “Are you a god?”
On another occasion, the boy leads Augiéras to his garden, and Augiéras, thinking of Eden, asks him to “name the fruits, trees, animals.” And so this innocent youth, whose name is Khrisna, expresses his dominion over the flora and fauna of the earth. After pointing to various things and naming them in Portuguese he shifts back to broken French and again broaches the subject of divinity, trying his best to articulate the feeling of having been connected with Augiéras in some way:
He turns his big eyes toward me; he looks at me for a long time in silence:
“You are a god! . . . I know you . . .”—He makes a broad gesture—“I know you since . . . forever! And Me . . . I love you! I place a hand on his sweet face.
“You too . . . you are a god,” I tell him, “and I’ve known you for all of Eternity.”
“And Me . . . before . . . I loved you already!” he cries, with a warm and melodious voice.
The boy’s sense of having known Augiéras “forever,” or having known him in some vague “before,” hints at the prospect of reincarnation, or even other worlds. It also suggests that time works differently than it seems. Children may, of course, intuit and appreciate these possibilities. In any event, Khrisna’s affection and reverence for a stranger is particularly touching when contrasted with Augiéras’s treatment at the hands of less enlightened people. Here, though, each individual properly recognizes the other as the incarnation of a god.
Augiéras would die in a hospital two and a half years later, in 1971, after suffering another heart attack. He was indeed not “very old,” at forty-six years. Yet in his life he saw and did far more than do most people who live twice as long.
No doubt some readers will have had the sense of having known before—or always—this misunderstood and beatific man who was destined, as Jean Chalon writes in the postface to Domme, “to radiate like a subterranean light, like a secret sun.” In him it is possible to find a kinship not unlike that which Augiéras himself found with Rimbaud, a fellow wanderer and mystic with deep ties to Africa. During the writing of Le voyage des morts, after all, Augiéras had carried the renegade poet’s works by a string tied round his belt, and Une adolescence au temps du Maréchal was initially titled Un Rimbaud au temps du Maréchal. But while Rimbaud renounced his poetic vision as a utopian dream and reinvented himself as a capitalist in Africa, Augiéras never abandoned his literary and spiritual project. He remains ahead of his time.
