S’en aller

“François Sureau, lawyer and Academician, also once wore the legendary white kepi. His marked taste for uniforms and the outward attributes of office reflects, if anything, a desire to anchor himself in the social order, tempered by an unquenchable thirst for elsewhere, off the beaten track (…) The text examines the wanderings (…) of celebrated travel writers such as Pierre Loti and William Somerset Maugham; these encounters are spiced with novelistic anecdotes, like those of the wandering Joseph Kessel and Kim Philby, the Arabic-speaking master spy. He is also, one might add, nostalgic for a cosmopolitan world peopled by travelers — not tourists — who combined aesthetic taste with a thirst for knowledge.” (Levoyer, in Études, no. 4316, June 2024). A triumph!