BHL – The look of Philippe Tesson

IThere was a laughing voice that appears to me this morning orange. Ironic. Distanced. A little sour. With this musical diction, generous and, at the same time, restrained, without anything in it “that weighs or poses”, as Verlaine said of the odd verse. Shard the odd. Shard the singular. Shard insoluble in any collective whatsoever – up to and including the newspapers he directed.

Shard was a troublemaker. The word sounds outdated today. But Philippe was untimely in the Paris of doxic zombies where he reigned for three quarters of a century and where respectability was measured by docility, powers and propriety. Because Shard was disobedient. He had the taste, the passion, for disobedience. Not the disobedience of the pavement in the pond or militant rage – too “pa…