I’ve seen dark things, terrible people, and sorrowful lives. I’ve seen the sun setting over the swamps, my little lonely shack flying away in the storm, my India inks floating in the water. I was alone, but I wanted this perpetual retreat. So many hours, more than reasonable, were hard, troubling, unfair. They called me the tramp man of Bourges. One day, I was the man in the ragged tunics, the next, a repulsive, devastated man.

Thus begins the literary memoirs of a man of the street, born in 1913, murdered in 1978. A kind illustrator and peasant from Berry, devastated, misanthropic, and wild, this unusual character really existed. His name was Marcel Bascoulard. Through the thousands of drawings and photographs he left behind, parts of his life come to light. And yet, his chosen marginality, his taste for mystery, his determined solitude, and his exacerbated suffering hide his tracks. Bascoulard loved his mother (who had murdered her husband), lived in an abandoned truck, and sold his drawings for whatever he was offered.

Based on the true story of an extraordinary life, Nicolas Diat tells all and leaves free reign to his imagination in order to try and penetrate the secrets that this heavenly tramp, this shattered character carried to the grave. With this singular debut novel, at once oniric, melancholic, and luminous, Nicolas Diat pulls us into a strange, fascinating world.