Jean Cau

Jean Cau à Lucas

JEAN CAU, A MAN OF HONOUR

Jean Cau to Lucas

“I admire your initiative, your asceticism, but let me tell you again, without your majestic talent, and I use these words wittingly, your ceremonial song would not “bring down the vaults of the temple” in the words of Esprit Fléchier…”

Author, journalist, polemicist, secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre age 22 and recipient of the Prix Goncourt for ‘The Mercy of God’.
Alain Delon, who was also his friend, his brother, described Jean Cau in the following words: “All his life, this loyal Gaullist was a resistant, showing resistance to the Sartre-styled left-wing he came from.

He was a resistant in the face of human stupidity which he found stifling, of the cash is king mentality which he felt revulsion towards, a resistant to the world of Mitterrand which he loathed and the managerial right which he abhorred, and a resistant to the decadence spawned by the modern world.

Jean Cau bothered people, stopped them from going round in circles, fought against foolishness and baseness. It was only natural that this champion of corridas should be likened to a conquistador. He had the presence of a conquistador, shared his taste for combat and his panache and insolence. Personally, he saw himself more as a dark ‘caballero’, a ruined ‘hidalgo’, a torero ‘stitched back together’ and it’s true that there was something of the Minotaur about him, half man-half beast, a lover of combat and evasion, of reflection, of life and death; you will love and hate literature and the bull as yourself.