Melvil Poupaud

So thin he’s nearly transparent, his complexion immaculately white, crowned with sunglasses and accompanied by a wheeled suitcase…Could he be Aurelius Augustinus a Roman from Africa?

Through an undulated conversation we witness him accept the most faraway destinations… Could he be a lawyer or teacher in Rome, or then in Carthage where he founded a school of rhetoric?

Talking of a young girl with an angelic face, he recalls the conflict of generations… Might he have been born in Thagaste, Numidia, November 13, 384?

Caught between a mathematician father, a filmmaker mother a rock and roll brother and a hairdresser grandma who thought warts were a sign of the devil…Could he be torn between love for a woman he’s known since 1 ? and who bore his son Adeat in 372?, his passion for music and his metaphysical anxieties?

He admits to reading the Bible but he’s so superstitious that one time he made a new year’s resolution to give up the wooden plank he’s been touching seven and a half times, 30 seconds go before falling asleep each night in his bed… After reading Cicero when he was 18, might he have converted to Manichaeism to battle the internal conflicts tearing him apart?

Aware that he only turns to religion when he’s steeped in misfortune…
Might he have sunk into debauchery for a time?

The night before his wedding, he experienced a genuine illumination and was suddenly filled with an irrational love brought on by infinite forgiveness… Could it have been a revelation in a garden in Milan where he heard a voice he took to be that of God? Genuinely convinced by the divine forgiveness encompassing all human beings of all time in perfect harmony… Could he have withdrawn with a handful of friends to write his first philosophical essays?

As more of a believer than a man of the cloth, he doesn’t believe in dogma… Could he have gone on a three year retreat in a monastery then taken ecclesiastical orders?He’s baptized with beer and chips and has filmed himself since he was just a boy… Might he have simultaneously produced an immense body of philosophical and theological work?

Today he’s in his thirties, has brown curls, is filled with grace and people smile at him in the street… Could Saint Augustine have been reincarnated as Melvil Poupard?

©"Portrait-en-mots" Stéphanie Cohen Chaptal