FOLLOW THE NARRATOR

 

VALERY is the main link with the commissioner, a PUBLISHER from Strasbourg, a fan of a good book and new technology who has entrusted Valery with organising and coordinating all the journeys through space and time to the Sources of Europe, and offered him the chance to choose his travelling companions. He meets CHARLES-JOSEPH, a mischievous Beligan diplomat, in Spa and GEORG, a thermal doctor, in Vichy. The latter tells him about CLARA, a young female musician. And the quartet to travel across the Europe of thermal towns over two years is formed.

 

For this original adventure, he takes the name of VALERY when he discovers that the person who will give him time to go back in time is VALERY LARBAUD, who was born in Vichy in 1881 and died in the same town in 1957, after a long period of aphasia. The son of a pharmacist who discovered the Saint-Yorre spring, this travelling writer spent his childhood in the Bourbonnais. A natural European, Larbaud travelled as much around Great Britain as Italy, Spain and Portugal, mastering their languages to such an extent that he was able to translate the works of certain innovative authors such as James Joyce.

 

As a result, VALERY, the novel’s character, becomes Larbaud’s heir, and shares a number of traits with the writer. A recent retiree, this trained biologist has become over time a specialist in European cinema and literary criticism. He is a big traveller who reads voraciously, speaks and writes a number of languages and corresponds with hundreds of friends through all the means available nowadays through the internet: blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Pinterest boards. He is both ‘technological’ and ‘trendy’, a connoisseur of contemporary cinema and the visual arts. However, thanks to the chance to time travel that the PUBLISHER has granted him, he is still eager to dive into this nostalgic ambience of bygone eras, the illustrious of which can still be seen particularly clearly in the thermal towns.