Marcel Boulestin - Life and Career - Early Years

Early Years

Born in Poitiers, Périgord, France, Boulestin was raised by his mother and his maternal grandmother in Poitiers. His parents lived apart, and the young Boulestin spent a month each summer with his father in Saint-Aulaye. He was educated in Poitiers, and later in Bordeaux, where he was nominally a law student, but in practice was a full-time concert-goer and member of the musical scene of the city. He wrote "Letter from Bordeaux" for Courrier Musical, a musical review, and published his first book, a dialogue, Le Pacte, for which the humorous writer Willy (Henry Gauthier-Villars), husband of the novelist Colette, wrote a preface. Despite Willy's endorsement, the book was not a success.

After compulsory military service in 1899, Boulestin moved to Paris and worked for Willy as a secretary and as one of the several ghostwriters he employed for his sensational and well-selling books, among them Curnonsky and Colette. Willy's stories and novels often included characters taken from his friends and collaborators. His Claudine and Minne series and other novels sketched Colette's youth, peppered with characters taken from other spheres, like the clearly homosexual "Hicksem" and "Blackspot", both taken from Boulestin's personality. Willy's novel En Bombe (1904) portrayed his life with Boulestin and his other secretaries, illustrated with 100 posed photos showing Willy himself as Maugis, Marcel Boulestin as Blackspot, another secretary Armory as Kernadeck, Colette as Marcelle, Marcelle as Jeannine, and Colette's dog Toby-Chien. Also, in 1905, Boulestin's French translation of The Happy Hypocrite by Max Beerbohm was published in the Mercure de France, with a caricature of Boulestin by Beerbohm. Boulestin had to convince a sceptical editor that Beerbohm really existed and was not an invention of Boulestin's. He also acted on occasion, alongside Colette, in several plays written by Willy.