![]() ![]() As a youth, he was fascinated by Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amerique (1791) and by his Essai sur les Revolutions (1797). Gracq was a schoolboy with exceptional abilities, and among his many prizes was Les Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras, which in later life he was to declare his idol's masterpiece. The favourite author in his sheltered country childhood was Jules Verne, that great fictional geographer. He spent 23 years of his life teaching these subjects at the Lyce Claude Bernard in Paris, a meticulously ordered calling that he kept strictly apart from his creative writing, which he did not begin until he was 27, with the first of his four magnificent novels, Au Chateau d'Argol (1938, The Castle of Argol) a work whose weirdly atmospheric fantasy at once puts a spell on the reluctant reader. ![]() ![]() He was primarily a geographer and historian. Gracq, whose real name was Louis Poirier, was born in St Florent-le-Vieil, in the Loire, in 1910. ![]()
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