nº102 / ÉDITIONS STOCK / MY NIGHT IN THE MUSEUM / PARIS

France’s oldest publishing house, Éditions Stock, has built a series of prestigious and diverse book collections, one of which is Ma Nuit au musée, and for the series, they proposed to their authors to spend a night alone in a museum of their choice and record the experience for their future books.

Review by Sylvain Marcoux

MY NIGHT AT

THE MUSEUM: For the book collection Ma Nuit au musée, published by Éditions Stock, different authors were invited to spend a night alone in a museum with the artworks

An intimate, timeless moment.

Blending poetry.

A philosophical reflection.

An aesthetic appreciation.

Each book opens up a fresh dialogue between literature, heritage, and creativity.

PHOTO / Reading is not a privilege, it is a necessity / Photo © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander

At the end of the 19th century, in Paris, Pierre-Victor Stock gave his name to the publishing house, although its history began a century and a half earlier, on 8 May 1708. As a result of successive inheritance, from the bookshop behind rue Saint-Jacques to the Éditions Stock offices on rue de Fleurus, the thread has remained unbroken for more than three centuries.

PHOTO / Stock book store 1909, Paris / Photo © Courtesy of Éditons Stock

Their history has been carried by generations of booksellers, publishers and translators, but above all, by books and authors. As France’s oldest publishing house, they have built a prestigious catalogue encompassing both French and international literature.

The literary collection Ma Nuit au musée was launched in 2018, and Éditions Stock has published nearly 30 volumes since its inception. Conceived and edited by Alina Gurdiel of Éditions Stock, the collection is based on a sole and original idea: inviting authors to spend an entire night in the museum of their choice, alone with its collections and artworks.

Each book offers a different reading experience. This is the particular appeal of the collection: works become subjects for conversation, museums become spaces for the imagination, and a visit becomes an opportunity for personal reflection.

PHOTO / "La Nuit sur commande" by  Christine Angot / Photos © Courtesy of Édition Stock

LA NUIT SUR COMMANDE by Christine Angot

/ Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection (Paris)

The first journey into these literary nights was La Nuit sur commande, written by Christine Angot. She chooses to spend a night at the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, a place associated with contemporary art, prestige and power. Yet Christine Angot subverts the expectations of the literary commission.

The title, La Nuit sur commande, came to her immediately, establishing a vertiginous connection between the “commissioned night” at the museum and the “sexual demands” she was subjected to between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.

PHOTO / Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris / Photos © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander

For Angot, the discovery of art remains inseparable from incest. During her adolescence, museum visits and lessons in architecture preceded the abuse inflicted upon her by her father in a hotel room.

From the uncomfortable experience of spending a night in a museum in solitude, the narrative moves on from her childhood in Châteauroux to the present days in Paris, examining the structure of hierarchy, wealth and domination at work within families, love affairs and friendships - especially with French artist Sophie Calle - as well as the world of publishing and contemporary art. By turning the book commission on its head, Christine Angot transforms her night at the museum into a powerful exploration of control and power.

PHOTO / "Bleu Bacon" by Yannick Haenel / Photo © Courtesy of Éditions Stock

BLEU BACON by Yannick Haenel

/ Centre Pompidou (Paris)

In Bleu Bacon, Yannick Haenel spends a night at the Centre Pompidou, among the forty-two paintings assembled for the exhibition devoted to Francis Bacon. From the moment the author enters the museum, contemplation becomes an almost hallucinatory experience: an ocular migraine, a powerful painkiller, then an awakening between two dimensions, as the pigments seem to tear at his eyes and draw him into a dizzying “bath of light”

PHOTOS / "Bleu Bacon" by Yannick Haenel - portraits of George Dyer / Photos © Courtesy of Éditions Stock

Torch in hand, the writer moves through the deserted galleries, overwhelmed by the violence, sensuality and sexual intensity of Bacon’s work. In his portraits of George Dyer — the painter’s tragic lover, who died of an overdose on the eve of Bacon’s retrospective at Paris Grand Palais in 1971 — Bacon depicts a man who never ceases to die before our eyes.

PHOTOS / "Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres" by Francis Bacon / Photos © Courtesy of Éditions Stock

Confronted with Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, wounds and blood become keys to the pictorial enigma. Gradually, blue ceases to be merely the colour: it becomes a way of seeing, an inner light that restores the writer’s sight. From this encounter with Bacon’s painting, an intimate adventure emerges, as violent as it is enchanting.

Yannick Haenel dedicated Bleu Bacon to the memory of Philippe Sollers, the French writer, publisher and great intellectual.

PHOTO / "L’imparfait" by Éric Reinhardt / Photo © Courtesy of Éditions Stock

L’IMPARFAIT by Éric Reinhardt

/ Galleria Borghese (Rome)

In L’imparfait, Éric Reinhardt imagines spending a night beside a Sleeping Hermaphroditus, at the heart of the magnificent Galleria Borghese in Rome, among Bernini’s sculptures, and the paintings of Bellini, Raphael and Caravaggio. Unlike the version held at the Louvre, this life-sized ancient sculpture of the hermaphrodite, created in the second century, rests upon a marble mattress placed against a wall. It is therefore impossible to walk around it, even though its captivating form invites contemplation from every angle.

 PHOTO / "Sleeping Hermaphroditus" resting on a marble mattress, completed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini / Photo © Courtesy of Éditions Stock

Fascinated by this chimerical figure, Reinhardt seeks to restore its profound nature, sensuality and complete identity. He interweaves the account of his night in the museum with a love story featuring Gloria, a singer who appears as a contemporary reincarnation of the hermaphrodite. Interlaced with mythology, the narratives echo one another in sensual and striking ways.

 PHOTO /  Sculpture by Bernini at the Galleria Borghese / Photo © Courtesy of Galleria Borghese

On the designated day, Éric Reinhardt has hidden a duvet in his suitcase, intending to cover the statue with it and lie down beside it. But first, he had to overcome a series of administrative obstacles and evade the watchful eye of a suspicious night guard at the door, giving a charming, somewhat comical, and certainly a delightfully snobbish touch to the scene.

Combining self-mockery with stylistic virtuosity, L’Imparfait explores desire, love and the violence that permeates relationships between men and women. The hermaphrodite embodies the possibility of reconciliation: ¨To be both man and woman is to know the perfection of love¨ Reinhardt writes. The absolute equality of these two identities stands in contrast to Bernini’s sculptures, so often marked by predation and violence. By looking at things differently, Éric Reinhardt transforms our point of view of seeing things.

PHOTO / "Le Buveur de brume" by Guillaume Gallienne / Photo © Courtesy of Éditions Stock

 LE BUVEUR DE BRUME by Guillaume Gallienne

/ National Museum (Tbilisi)

In Le Buveur de brume, Guillaume Gallienne arrives in Georgia, where he is due to be welcomed at the National Museum of Tbilisi and reunited with the portrait painted by Savely Sorine of his great-grandmother, Princess Melita Cholokachvili, a magnificent muse of Georgian literary life in the early 20th century.

Instead, he discovers that he is expected at the National Gallery of Tbilisi, to which the portrait has been moved. Furious and deeply frustrated, he must relinquish all that this long-awaited night had promised. What he had hoped to recover was his Georgian self: the legacy of his great-grandmother, known as Babou, and of his grandmother Caï, whose presence marked his childhood.

PHOTO / National Gallery of Tbilisi / Photo © Courtesy of National Gallery of Tbilisi

He had obtained permission to spend the night at the National Museum from Georgia’s then President, Salomé Zourabichvili, who held office between 2018 and 2024, but the Minister of Culture — a pro-Putin, far-right Georgian Dream Party member and an opponent of Zourabichvili - played a dirty trick on him, claiming that “there has been a misunderstanding: the National Museum has supposedly been confused with the National Gallery”. 

With no choice, Guillaume Gallienne makes his way to a place resembling a modern art gallery, where the portrait has been moved and left there like nothing more than a decorative ornament – an absurdity, as the painting had been torn from its original context.

“I came here as a Georgian, and you are treating me like a tourist!” argued the author with the museum’s guard. “My great-grandmother’s portrait has no place here… There is no question of me staying here, in this museum, not even for a minute, do you hear me? You will not have my dreams. You will not have my dreams!”

 PHOTO / Princess Melita Cholokachvili by Savely Sorine and modelling for Chanel / Photo © Courtesy of National Museum Tbilisi

Ultimately, however, this misunderstanding proved fortunate. Denied the night he had imagined, Guillaume Gallienne — actor and a member of the distinguished theatre, the Comédie-Française — abandons the narrative he had planned and reveals himself with disarming honesty. His anger opens a breach through which childhood memories, family voices, ghosts, legends, and the memory of exile emerge. Alongside the shadows of Babou and his grandmother, Caï appears alongside those of travelling painters and great writers who accompany him, particularly Marcel Proust and Anton Chekhov.

Through this experience, he draws a genuine lesson and writes: “One does not necessarily need something extraordinary to feel alive and to create.”

“Marcel Proust and Anton Chekhov are masters of this art because they seek out, in their everyday lives, what is most human: what each of us reveals or tries to conceal, the wretched and the beautiful. From this, they weave a work that gathers up, like a round dance, all the colours of life.”

“On this night in Tbilisi, Guillaume Gallienne is Georgian in his blood, not just a tourist,” he writes. “There is culture, curiosity, dignity and tenderness. There is a mingling born of distant lands and languages; there is exile, courage and strength.”

The most beautiful journeys are often unexpected; sometimes they do not lead us where we intended to go. In setting out to meet his great-grandmother, Princess Melita Cholokachvili, Guillaume Gallienne ultimately discovers and reveals himself.

PHOTO / "Après Dieu" by Richard Malka  / Photo © Courtesy of Éditions Stock

APRÈS DIEU by Richard Malka

/ Panthéon (Paris)

In Après Dieu, Richard Malka enters an imaginary dialogue with Voltaire in the crypt of the Panthéon. Through this encounter between Voltaire, the irreverent philosophe des Lumières, and Malka, a well-respected lawyer of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and grandson of a Moroccan Jewish grandmother who spoke only Arabic, Malka emerges with an impassioned defence of laïcité, which is the French principle of secularism enshrined in the law of 1905.

Faced with the rise of religious fanaticism and the constraints of communal identity, their voices echo one another across the centuries. Voltaire maintained that tyrants had corrupted the world and that, subsequently, “priests were invented to oppose the tyrants, and the priests were worse”. He believed that religion, which had infected the world, must be crushed, and that doing so would be “the greatest service one could render to humankind”.

Richard Malka resists Voltaire with a verse from the Qur’an: “Had your Lord so willed, everyone on earth would have believed. Is it then for you to compel people to become believers?”

The problem is that every religion carries the seeds of its own fanaticism. Christianity gave rise to the Crusades, the Inquisition and Colonisation; Judaism to other forms of Colonisation, and Islam to Daesh and Al-Qaeda. Obscurantism, pogroms, massacres, genocides and femicides have all arisen as a consequence of extreme religion.

PHOTO / Panthéon / Photo © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander

Do the two men therefore agree on everything? Not quite.

Following in the footsteps of the great French lawyers Robert Badinter and Georges Kiejman, Richard Malka evokes the terrorist attacks, the dead, his family history, his revulsion towards proselytism and his rejection of the respect and blind loyalty demanded for religions. An avowed non-believer, determined to preserve the right to laugh at God, he above all asks Voltaire the question that has brought him to the Panthéon: “What could replace God?”

A lawyer, writer and tireless defender of freedom of expression, Richard Malka is one of those voices that have become all too rare. A voice made all the more precious by the fact that, for the past ten years, speaking out has required him to live under special police protection.

PHOTO / An afternoon, not with a faun but with many books - reading / Photo © Courtesy of Sylvain Marcoux

EPILOGUE

Having spent days with Éditions Stock collection, even I imagined spending a night in a museum myself: alone with art, listening to silence, observing, feeling, and drawing on beauty to create a very personal experience.

These nocturnal interludes give rise to distinctive and unexpected stories, in which works of art become starting points for different forms of exploration. Whether through poetry, philosophical reflection, an aesthetic perspective or sociological analysis, each book creates a new dialogue between literature, heritage and artistic creation.

In the collection Ma Nuit au musée, each book offers a different emotion. This is the particular magic that transforms works into conversations, museums into spaces for imagination, and museum visits into a genuinely personal experience.

Precious reading that is to be savoured without moderation.

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INDEX

COVER

Photo © Courtesy of Sylvain Marcoux

Cover design © ZOLTAN+MEDIA Paris

PUBLISHING

“Ma Nuit au Musée“ Collection

Éditions Stock

Paris (France)

BOOK TITLES

“Bleu Bacon“ by Yannick Haenel

 “L’Imparfait” by Éric Reinhardt

“Après Dieu“ by Richard Malka

“La Nuit sur Commande“ by Christine Angot

“Le Buveur de Brume” by Guillaume Gallienne

PHOTOGRAPHERS

© Éditions Stock

© Sylvain Marcoux

© Zoltan Alexander

VISUALS & WEBDESIGN

© Zoltan Alexander ZOLTAN+MEDIA Paris

WEB LINK

https://www.editions-stock.fr