Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, In Search of the Miracle, Albin Michel, September 30, 2026, 224 pages, €19.90
Every hour we live is an hour of agony for someone. There must be more hours of agony than hours of the living. The clock of death bears numbers beyond count.
In Cucugnan, more than fifteen years ago, Roland Feuillas, the friendly baker, insisted on introducing me to his guest. The man embraced me, and I have never received anything like it. Thousands of people line up beneath a tent just to gain a second in Amma’s embrace. Hers is more beautiful and more healing. Jean-Philippe de Tonnac publishes with Albin Michel In Search of the Miracle, a account of four years of offensives against an incurable illness, dictated because his two hands had ceased to write. He recounts an indescribable joy.
The Embrace of Cucugnan
Some people know that I am not easy to approach. The man who offered me his hand that day in the Hautes Corbières was finishing, with my friend Anne Brenon, a joint investigation into Catharism, and instantly inspired in me a trust without reservation. There are embraces that surprise you. His is unforgettable, of such force that it restores in your body a desire to live, a desire for joy, that he had lost without even realizing it. For here is the paradox of this being: he is immarcescible, and he repairs you with a single gesture.
Jean-Philippe was then a member of the editorial committee of the Bouquins collection, where in 2010 he brought forward his Dictionnaire Universel du Pain. He is the one who carried Les Initiés, my survey of initiatory figures since the year one, conceived in distinction from Édouard Schuré’s Grandes Initiés. He became my editor, with all that implies: the door opening at last in the most prestigious collection, and the lifelong work that is thereby legitimized. By pulling me into his arms, asking nothing in return, he changed my destiny.
I did not then know the burden carried by this man, and which is certainly at the root of his illness: fifteen years of mental anorexia at the end of adolescence, and a mother who took her own life. The man who now contemplates his finitude has spent fifteen years bargaining with hunger. He inflicted upon himself a terrible ordeal. “What I know, I have paid for it,” wrote Francis Carco.
The One Who Asked the Questions
With great humility, he described himself as a “scribe-driver.” That is the place he had chosen in the world of letters. About thirty of his interview books bear the name of another on the cover. Théodore Monod on the future of our species; Christiane Desroches Noblecourt before the gaze of the gods; Anne Brenon dismantling eight centuries of Occitan myths; Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière resisting the disposal of books; and then The Dead of Our Life, with Damien Le Guay, where Juliette Binoche, Christian Bobin, and Edgar Morin—among others—tell of their deceased loved ones.
A single rule governs this literary exigency: Jean-Philippe de Tonnac experiments. To direct his Dictionary of Bread, he obtains a bakery CAP. To write The Circle of the Healers, he is treated by each healer rather than observing from the margins, as many would. The man struck by the diagnosis in the summer of 2023 will change his protocol. The questioner will henceforth sit on the side of the one being questioned.
A Body Ensnared
Summer 2022, in Morbihan, a couple about to leave Montmartre is looking for the house that will host the continuation of their adventures. A slight weakness appears between the thumb and index finger of the left hand. No pain, so no action for months. The treating physician dodges, the rheumatologist declines, the neurologist admits lacking the necessary equipment, Pitié-Salpêtrière takes over. A neurologist grabs a blank sheet, sketches the ballet of motor neurons, explains what the degeneration does. Motor neuron disease, a term that medicine prefers at this stage to the words amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Charcot’s disease. No treatment.
The progression advances through confiscations, and the precision of the inventory gives the book its force. In winter, the wood stove becomes perilous. The wrists become “two ball-bearing joints forcing my two hands into a mad gesturing.” The nights belong to cramps. Then comes the central mourning, that of the hands—forty years and perhaps as many as forty books written with a fountain pen, a ballpoint, a typewriter, now to be handed over to dictation. He calls his two hands his two secretaries and asks whether they were not two brains allied, capable of standing up to the thinking matrix. Abandoning them appears to him as a betrayal.
One scene is missing from this book, and I must recount it. Saint-Siffret, at the outset of the illness. Jean-Philippe de Tonnac had invited me to the grand house that overlooks Mont Bouquet. We were at table, and there was bread. He took it, pressed it against the wooden board, sought the angle, and the blade slid without piercing the crust. Such a gesture requires a grip that the illness had just stolen from him: a firm hand gripping the loaf. This man earned a breadmaking CAP to give himself the right to write his dictionary; he followed living wheat in Roland Feuillas’ footsteps all the way to Cucugnan’s mill; he wrote a novel about the last bread, the bread of Christ; and now he could no longer cut a slice.
I said nothing; I even pretended not to see. I looked away with the concentration of an actor, told a few trifles, and gave him all the time he needed. There are two ways to love a man whose hands are leaving him. The book contains one—the friend who leans in without ceremony over the pizza in Uzès and cuts it into pieces. I took the other—the one that left him a semblance of autonomy. I do not know which was best at the time. He managed to cut through his slice. We kept talking, and the bread that day had a special flavor.
I have just finished the very beautiful work by Cécilia Dutter, Let Life Breathe in You. For Jean-Philippe, that may soon become an impossible injunction. At the end of December 2025, three days of hospitalization make non-invasive ventilation mandatory, and he returns home with a ventilator that will now dominate the bed. We were in Ireland that night. I called to wish him a happy new year and to remind him of a line attributed to Rilke, “And now, we greet the New Year. May it be full of things that have never happened,” and he tells me he will now sleep under a mask. The night was the last territory where he still resembled the man he had been, arms at rest, free to dream.
Renata, Who Never Relents
Renata then takes the initiative. Born in Santiago, raised in the Atacama Desert, an actress, she reads, investigates, writes in Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, and the book owes her a depth of research that its author confesses he could never have found alone. What they undertake is as much a quest of initiation as it is care. A shaman from Brazil. A Yaqui curandero who places the operation under the patronage of the last Aztec emperor, and a white turban to be kept for thirteen days, and finally a Philippine healer whose cottons run with blood on an otherwise intact shoulder. It was all worth trying. Everything deserved to be lived, and as Maurice Maeterlinck said: “It is not death that attacks life; it is life that resists death with stubborn defiance.”
The following autumn, before a meeting in Perpignan, he makes a stop at our home. I was held in Paris, and it was my wife Emmanuelle who welcomed him, fed him, cherished him, and set him back on his way at dawn. In the meantime he had married Renata, to give her a home and security that his status as a seasonal worker denied him. A few months later, that same man begs her to leave: Run away, Renata, run away.
Four Days, the Time of a Butterfly
I enter the narrative without intending to. A few months earlier, I had wished to introduce to Jean-Philippe the remarkably talented Bélinda Ibrahim, head of culture for Ici Beyrouth. A dinner at the Closerie des Lilas, a joyful evening in the company of a woman of great elegance, and nothing to foretell what would come next. And yet, I am grateful to existence for having played the loveliest role that was mine, that of a bridge between two luminous beings. When he wished to bow before Saint Charbel’s relics, in the Lebanese mountains, he naturally turned to Bélinda. He asked her for hotel addresses. In the morning, he received this: Hello to you, Jean-Philippe; don’t worry about anything, I’ll take care of everything. I’ve also booked Annaya.
She offered him four days of her time, she who holds the culture pages of a daily newspaper, and she would not leave his side for a moment, not a step, not a blink. What happens to Jean-Philippe de Tonnac at the moment he crosses the great door of the sanctuary is captured in a few lines that determine the whole volume. I will refrain from recounting them, for what occurred in Lebanon belongs—my own view—to the book’s most beautiful pages. The meeting with Lebanon and Bélinda brought Jean-Philippe far more joy than ten thousand people gathered beneath Amma’s tent would give him eight months later.
And that is why the book keeps Lebanon as its final word, and I take it very seriously. He intends to return to Annaya, to find his friend Bélinda Ibrahim, and to pray with her in the Lebanese mountains so that peace can prevail over war. A man who crossed the Mediterranean with already a short breath and two useless hands, and who returned bearing that joy, will ascend the road to Byblos again. I want to believe it, and I do. Bélinda awaits him, and the tiny room of the pilgrims’ inn awaits him.
And for the day of the great crossing, I address a supplication to my mentor, Maurice Magre, who devoted his work to hidden things and who died on December 11, 1941. He writes that he loves those who think of death, of the death of loved ones and of their own, and that they form a small family whose members recognize themselves by the first words exchanged. Two men who have spent their lives questioning the unseen will have no trouble recognizing one another. I beg him to welcome Jean-Philippe on the other side of the veil and to guide him toward his dearest beings, and perhaps, in the end, perhaps I may already belong to them, for the beauty of death is that it loves to surprise us!
“Praise be to death, which, when one contemplates it, sheds its funeral finery, drops its parade of bones to take on the body of beauty and the face of hope.”
Maurice Magre, The Death and the Life Beyond, 1932
The article In Search of the Miracle, the Embrace of Jean-Philippe de Tonnac first appeared on Mare Nostrum.
