Patrick Roegiers, Anachronistic Guide to the House, Arléa, August 27, 2026, 104 pages, 15 €
A novelist who began with Seuil and later published with Grasset, Patrick Roegiers received in 2025 the Geneviève Moll Prize for a biographical work about Erik Satie. His Anachronistic Guide to the House, issued by Arléa in the collection overseen by Anne Bourguignon, opens twelve dwellings—nearly all inhabited by creators—and reveals, anecdote after anecdote, what a place makes of the work conceived within it.
For the most steadfast among them, a creative space is valuable precisely for what it withholds from the outside world. Samuel Beckett writes Endgame at Ussy-sur-Marne, before a walnut desk anchored beside a window. After winning the Nobel in 1969, two burglaries cost him his underwear and two typewriters, but spare his manuscripts. He then has a wall of concrete blocks erected to block the horizon, which he crowns with a kilometer of barbed wire that he wraps around with his own hands. Beneath Ussy’s lawn, moles continue their own work. Beckett, haunted by those diggings to the point of comparing himself to a mole in his molehill, asks his friends to write to him at Ussy-sur-Taupes. In the narrative of this war, Roegiers interweaves with a keen ear the reply where Estragon, in Waiting for Godot, tells the landscapes to sod off in order to demand the basement.
Jean-Pierre Raynaud bricks up the openings of his dwelling, white-tiled like a morgue, where Mozart’s Requiem is the sole soundtrack, and then has the building razed in March 1993 to expose the rubble in 976 surgical containers. Curzio Malaparte, who desired a villa in his own image, places opposite the void the solitary chair from his desk to withdraw from the site’s splendor. At night, the same man sits at his door to bark at the dogs, who answer from afar.
Benoîte Groult, for her part, keeps an open table. She writes her books between two stacks of lobster crates in the Kerry house she had built with Paul Guimard, where François Mitterrand, arriving by helicopter in August 1988, takes his lunch on the kitchen’s oilcloth.
Anachronistic, the guide is methodical in its construction. The chapters are linked by hidden doors, one leading from Raynaud’s barbed wire to that of Ussy. Admitted in 1919 to the sanatorium of Rueil-Malmaison, Georges Feydeau stayed in the Pavilion of the Tilleuls, a name shared with the former brothel where Jean-Paul Kauffmann would take refuge in the Landes forest. Malaparte peddles on his rooftop terrace as Beckett once pedaled toward the shops of Ussy. As the partnership of Edward Hopper and Jo wears on, the painter’s red tones fade to a pinkish, almost colorless hue, akin to Satie’s music. The approach is apt, for such rhymes render the book a single house, where every room illuminates the one beside it.
One rainy November evening in 2018, Patrick Roegiers stands before the anonymous façade of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s house, in whose garden lies Bébert the cat. He forbids himself to push the black gate and photographs the façade with his phone, so moved that he forgets to appear in the image. The same reticence is preserved by photographer Marcel Imsand, who withholds the location of the Vaud farm where octogenarian twins alternately wore the same denture, less than two hundred meters from a highway.
With Satie, whose room in Arcueil remained closed for twenty-seven years, the inventory alone crosses the threshold. Piles of scores lie beside forty thousand scraps of calligraphic paper, two pianos tied one atop the other, and fourteen umbrellas still wrapped in their packaging. By letting these objects stand, more than a confession, they compose the portrait of the composer who described himself as a phonométographe—a kind of sound photographer. Roegiers is right to place them at the center of the narrative.
To these twelve dwellings, Patrick Roegiers adds a thirteenth, built in sentences beneath Arléa’s roof, where the windows once bricked up by the recluses reopen, one by one, to daylight. We therefore keep this guide at hand as the key to a house to which one loves to return.
The article Anachronistic Guide to the House Explores the Dwellings of Artists first appeared on Mare Nostrum.
