Eric Tabarly, La Force Quiet

C E 12 June 1998, Pen-Duick leaves the Newlyn fishing port, at the end of the Cornouaille.For Eric Tabarly and his teammates, the day promises to be pleasant, the southern wind will promote the climb to Scotland where many sailboats must be built by three generations of architects-constructors, Fife.In the evening the wind is forced, the sea is restless.Around 11:30 p.m., Tabarly decides to reduce the sail a little further.A delicate operation on this old rig, the square meters to brew are important and during the operation, the sailing, heavy, oscillates from one edge to the other.It was enough of a gîte, Eric Tabarly disappeared at sea, he was going to be 67 years old.

This sailor, as popular as Father Pierre or Commander Cousteau, remains, the years passing, a sort of model.Ten years after his death, the number of works appear among booksellers, at the same time that was inaugurated, in Lorient, the city of sailing Eric-Tabarly.

The album of photographs composed by Jacqueline Tabarly, her widow, and Daniel Gilles is first of all a very beautiful staging of the sailor, his boats, his races and his last more walls on the banks of the Odet.Thanks to a substantial iconographic work - more than 350 photos are presented - and a neat layout, we bathe in nostalgia.

The blue of the sky, the green of the sea and the "quiet force" of the sailor combine to offer us a peaceful, powerful and reassuring "monument".Texts, most of them already published, of writers such as Jean-François Deniau, Paul Guimard, and Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, a admiral and some famous sailors enhance everything.Circumstanding texts, small style exercises which however do little more than the images of Tabarly in the company of Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon or Patrick Poivre d'Arvor.After the wife, the girl.Marie Tabarly, with the help of Patrick Mahé, in turn offers us an album of souvenir photos.The father is still as photogenic and muscular as the husband in the previous album, but this time next to the sailboats there are horses, the passion of the girl's daughter.

Two works that never stop knitting the legend of an exceptional sailor, but whose complexity is mainly revealed when reading the biographical work of Benoît Heimermann, who has just been reissued.The sober and thoughtful painting of a teenager little brought to the study but determined.He dreamed of admiral or lumberjack, he became a national hero, promoted to knight of the Legion of Honor by General de Gaulle, officer by Giscard d'Estaing and Commander, posthumously, by Jacques Chirac.

Man appears

The general public discovered it in 1964 when he won the Plymouth-Newport transatlantic solo race.He suddenly erases the French rout at the 1960 Olympic Games and the absence of the French football team at the 1962 World Cup.He is a winner and his taste for competition flourishes in a time that sees the disappearance of what the author calls "particle nauticalism", clear pants and blazer.

The world of sailing is transformed, associations such as the nautical center of Glénans from resistance form thousands of "veil", new materials are appearing, new techniques are implemented.Benoît Heimermann gives us, in this general context, the account of a path of a man both "simple but inaccessible; modest but dominating", "insensitive to fear, inaccessible to doubt".The author thus advances step by step, admiring but never idolatrous.He deciphers the major events that have marked the life of Eric Tabarly, tries to understand the character, highlights his richness, his visions without omitting his small.Thus man appears and the idol disappears.

The novelist Yann Queffélec also attempted to make his contribution to the beatification of the "adulated adornedness".A short text where the grandiloquent is mixed with the sensitive, where the delicacy and the liveliness of the pen arise especially when he forgets Tabarly to return to his own memories of childhood and adolescence: the perisses, learning toilet, the uncle Jo and his adventures Annamites, the Mirbelle brothers' site, the grandmother-vigie, not to mention all these mysterious boats which so much favor the imagination of the reader: the Petit-Charlot, the Niniobbo, God-Protège, Aviator-Mermoz...

Too bad the novelist needed Tabarly to offer us these nostalgic pages.Admittedly, he writes, this sailor "is the only one I want to look like", but does it justify such a wobbly composition?

To Eric de Jacqueline Tabarly and Daniel Gilles.ED.of oak, 232 p., 25 €.

Eric Tabarly, my father of Marie Tabarly with Patrick Mahé.ED.Michel Lafon, 160 p., € 29.95.

Tabarly by Benoît Heimermann.The pocket book, 540 p., € 6.95.

Tabarly by Yann Queffélec.The Archipelago-Fayard, 240 p., € 18.50.

Note the reissues of the interviews, in 1976, by Eric Tabarly with the journalist Gilles Pernet, Éd.The telegram, 156 p., 18 €.

Yves-Marc Ajchenbaum

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