Eduard joins L’Idiot international and begins writing in French

Eduard Limonov’s entry into Jean-Edern Hallier’s L'Idiot international turns an introduction over lunch into a new literary and social home. At the paper, Limonov begins writing in French, joins its editorial meetings, and finds himself among a company whose political contradictions and disorder seem less like obstacles than the conditions of belonging.

The Introduction at Brasserie Lipp

Fabienne Issartel, a friend of Limonov and a prominent figure in Paris nightlife, arranges a lunch at Brasserie Lipp because she thinks Hallier is the person he should meet. Her recommendation follows a blunt assessment: Limonov is angry with everyone and agrees with no one. The meeting therefore begins not as a conventional literary appointment but as a proposed match between two men whose antagonisms might prove compatible.

Hallier had recently relaunched L'Idiot international, a polemical weekly first founded twenty years earlier under Jean-Paul Sartre’s patronage. The account presents Hallier as flamboyant and provocative, a publisher whom even his own journalists suspected of working as a paid provocateur for Georges Pompidou’s police. His legend also included a disputed trip to Chile: he had gone to deliver money collected for the anti-Pinochet resistance, returned without delivering it, and left the money’s whereabouts unexplained. Fabienne knew the story and guessed that Limonov would appreciate it. Hallier’s cultivated writerly persona was inseparable from scandal and performance, qualities that gave the introduction its particular charge.

A Friendship Built on Contradiction

At lunch, Hallier is restless, his hair tousled and his white scarf hanging into his plate. He tells Limonov that a Russian bullet cost him an eye in Berlin, where his father, General Hallier, had been serving at the end of the war. The story is identified as fiction: Hallier told different versions of the accident to different people. The changing account belonged to his art of seduction, making the tale less a stable piece of biography than a performance staged for his companion.

The two nevertheless get along famously. Their political concerns do not coincide: Limonov is willing to agree politely when Hallier condemns François Mitterrand, while Hallier acknowledges Limonov’s hostility toward Mikhail Gorbachev. The meeting does not require them to share a complete political program. Instead, a mutual willingness to indulge the other’s preoccupations gives the friendship room to begin. Hallier’s invitation to write follows directly from this rapport.

Beginning to Write in French

Hallier tells Limonov that he should write about the subject they have been discussing. Limonov accepts without needing to be asked twice, but assumes he will need a translator. Hallier replies that he understands Limonov when he speaks and will understand what he writes. The exchange leads Limonov to begin writing in French and to attend the paper’s editorial meetings. A practical hesitation becomes a threshold into a new language of work: Hallier’s confidence supplies the invitation, and Limonov takes it up.

The meetings are held in Hallier’s large apartment on Place des Vosges. They begin with vodka at ten in the morning and can last until sunrise; when hunger intervenes, Hallier’s housekeeper, Luisa, cooks macaroni. The paper’s staff produces eight pages each week, but the gatherings extend well beyond the staff. Visitors arrive uninvited and enter the arguments, while Hallier encourages the uproar rather than trying to quiet it. Controversy is not simply an editorial topic here; it is the atmosphere in which the paper is made.

The Editorial Circle and Its Disorder

Limonov’s first visit places him among Patrick Besson, Marc-Édouard Nabe, Philippe Sollers, and Jacques Vergès. They are waiting for Jean-Marie Le Pen, but Henri Krasucki arrives instead. Sollers sits at the piano and sings The Internationale. In another small collision of political positions, Gabriel Matzneff congratulates Limonov on an article demanding a court-martial and firing squad for Gorbachev, while Matzneff’s own adjacent article praises the same leader, whose name he renders in the traditional style of the White Russians. He also compliments Limonov’s progress in French. The scene does not resolve its contradictions; it makes their coexistence part of the gathering’s character.

Because Limonov lives nearby, he returns increasingly often and sometimes brings Natasha. Familiarity changes his place in the room: the more he comes, the more at ease he becomes. Extreme left and extreme right drink arm in arm, and the most incompatible opinions are encouraged without turning the gathering into a formal debate. The group exchanges ways of getting paid by Hallier, quarrels and reconciles with him, and disconnects its telephone at night because the insomniac publisher habitually calls at five in the morning.

The disorder is also material. The printer and lawyers go unpaid, creditors wait outside, libel suits accumulate, and the participants do not know how the next issue will appear. The paper’s sociability and its precariousness are bound together: the same gatherings that sustain its polemical energy unfold amid debts and uncertainty about publication.

A Gang of His Own

At Place des Vosges, Limonov imagines himself inside The Three Musketeers, the book he loved as an adolescent. He casts himself as d’Artagnan of the quill, admitted to a band of drinkers and swashbucklers by Hallier, whose extravagance suggests Porthos, whose harebrained schemes suggest Aramis, and whose profound melancholy recalls Athos. The comparison gives the unruly circle a chivalric shape without disguising its comic, disreputable features.

Limonov’s conclusion is social rather than literary: a person needs a gang, and he believes Paris has no livelier one. His place in the circle rests not on political agreement or settled editorial order, but on repeated attendance, writing in French, and participation in its collisions. The episode thus makes joining the paper more than a professional step. Limonov enters a new language and, at the same time, finds a company in which disagreement, excess, and practical instability can coexist with a powerful sense of belonging.