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Jacques Deprat

Portrait of Jacques   Deprat

Jacques Deprat (31 Jul. 1880, Fontenay aux Roses, France — 7 March 1935, Ansaberre, Ansó, Pyrénées, Spain, in a mountaineering accident) was a biologist, paleontologist and novelist working in Indochina (Hanoi) in the 1910s, who was apparently wrongly accused of fraud and left Southeast Asia in 1919 after a few promising years.

Hired for the Geological Survey of Indochina (GSI) in 1908, Deprat worked,under the direction of Henri Mansuy (1857−1937), Honoré Lantenois (1863−1840) and later on Madeleine Colani (1866−1945), part of the French colonial project forthe railway line linking Yunnan-fou (now Kumning) to Hanoi, Vietnam.

Jacques Deprat1
Jean Deprat in the years 1900s.

Elected vice-president for Indochina by the World Congress of Geology, author of several scientific papers, Deprat was suddenly disgraced after being accused of fraud around some trilobites fossils recovered in Tonkin. Author Lia Genovese has contributed a paper on the first ever case of removal and posthumous rehabilitation from the French Society of Geology (​“Madeleine Colani and the Deprat Scandal at the Geological Survey of Indochina”, Journal of the Siam Society, Vol. 99, 2011, pp 272 – 92). On June 10, 1991, nearly seventy years after his humiliation, the Société Géologique de France decided to posthumously reimplement Jacques Deprat as a full-fledged member. In 1999, British novelist Roger Osborne devoted a novel, The Deprat Affair, to the case.

Under the pseudonym Herbert Wild, Deprat published a tell-all novel, Les Chiens aboient, back to France in 1926, and led a successful career as a novelist. In 1931, this fervent alpinist was granted the Grand Prix des Français d’Asie for his novel La Paroi de glacé (1927), over André Malraux and Jeanne Leuba. 

Publications

  • Les chiens aboient, Paris, Albin Michel, 1926; numerous reprints, Kindle edition 2014. | VN: Chó Cứ Sủa, tr. by Tạ Phương, 2020, 278 p. ISBN 9786049776823.
  • Dans les replis du dragon, Paris, Albin Michel, 1926; repr. Kailash, 1997, 317 p. ISBN 9782842680138. | ESP En la boca del dragón, tr. by Federico Jiménez, Barcelona, Coll. Horizonte, 1946.
  • Le Regard d’Apollon, Paris, Albin Michel, 1930.
  • L’autre race, Paris, Albin Michel, 1930 ; repr. as Le riz de Rangoon, Kailash, 2000, 120 p. ISBN 9782842680473. | ESP Otra Raza, Barcelona, Juventud, 1931.
  • L’Ambassade oubliée, Paris, Albin Michel, 1931.
  • Le Dernier avatar de Sambor Rutland, Paris, Albin Michel, 1932.
  • Le Capitaine du Faï-tsi-long, Paris, Albin Michel, 1935.
  • Das Gästebuch des Sesenheimer Pfarrhauses [The Guestbook at Sesenheimer Rectory], Morstadt Verlag, 160 p. ISBN 978388571116.