Largely self-taught, he read the classics of French literature on his own initiative while working as a haberdasher in Montargis, a town on the canal that links the Loire and the Seine.

One of his first customers was pre-eminent French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who purchased a complete edition of Shakespeare — for which he never paid.

His predilection for cramped, seedy, confusing and confining spaces, and for irregularities and repetitions in time, prompted some readers to compare his work with Kafka's.

Béalu did not publish a great deal of his own material in the magazine, in part because he chose to be a marginal, remote figure.

[citation needed] A film adaptation of L’Araignée d’eau was produced in 1968 by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, as interpreted by Elisabeth Wiener, Dutheil Marie-Angel and Marc Eyraud.

A radio adaptation of Le Bruit du Moulin was broadcast in 1966, with Edith Scob and Jean Topart.