Pierre Michon's 'Les Onze': A Fictional Masterpiece and the Hallucination of Painting

Pierre Michon's novel 'Les Onze' (Éditions Verdier), fifteen years in the making, tells the story of a fictional 18th-century painter, François-Élie Corentin, and his sole known work: a group portrait of the eleven members of the Committee of Public Safety, including Robespierre and Saint-Just. The narrative begins in Würzburg, where the young Corentin studies under Tiepolo at the Residenz palace, then flashes back to his childhood near Orléans, by a canal of the Loire dug by generations of Limousins exploited by his ancestor. The novel explores how a painting commissioned for bad reasons, painted without desire by a mediocre artist, becomes a masterpiece. Michon's dense, non-linear prose oscillates between the insignificant and the grand, creating a vertiginous reading experience. The book continues Michon's recurring theme of painting as both curse and redemption, seen in earlier works like 'Vies minuscules' (1984), 'Vie de Joseph Roulin' (1988), and 'Maîtres et serviteurs' (1990). In interviews compiled in 'Le Roi vient quand il veut' (Albin Michel, 2007), Michon describes his writing as a 'perpetual hallucination'—violently visual, charged, and trembling on the verge of disappearance. 'Les Onze' leaves readers 'seeing' a painting that does not exist, a persistent hallucination that may one day inspire a real painter to give it tangible form.