Marius Galéjade ou la figure du Marseillais affabulateur dans les récits sous images de S. Pania pour Arthème Fayard (1926-1939)

Abstract

Between 1926 and 1935, the painter and illustrator Paul d’Espagnat, better known under the pseudonym S. Pania, published a series of 93 histoires en images devoted to the character of Marius Galéjade in Les Belles Images and La Jeunesse illustrée, two children’s publications published by Arthème Fayard. S. Pania was not the inventor of Marius Galéjade, who was shared, rather than borrowed, by a few illustrators in the first half of the 20th century. The figure is in fact based on a type, that of “Marius le Marseillais”, a clumsy, boastful hunter. If the genealogy of this archetypal figure is difficult to establish, it’s because it stems from the meeting of several legendary liars, from Tartarin de Tarascon, to the Baron de Crac, via the navigator Pythéas. While the article will attempt to sketch out this popular character, who was widely disseminated in the imaginary world of his time, it aims above all to shed light on the reasons why, unlike his peers who visited him from time to time, S. Pania chose to devote a regular series to him, spanning almost ten years, and even endowed Marius with a serial filiation, Olive and Olivette, to the point of forming an abundant corpus made up of 126 histoires en images.

Keywords

• comic strips
• Paul d’Espagnat
• S. Pania
• Marius
• galéjade
• Arthème Fayard