Lot n° 39
Estimation :
1500 - 2000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 3 900EUR
CLAUDEL Paul (1868-1955).
9 L.A.S. "P. Claudel", 1919-1927, to Abbé Jacques DOUILLET; 30 pages of various sizes (several on letterhead), 6 envelopes and an address (some defects, the 1st letter entirely cut at the folds).
Beautiful and rich correspondence with a young priest, where Claudel evokes and comments on his works.
[Abbé Jacques DOUILLET (1893-1974), then under arms and a young seminarian, wrote to Claudel on May 10, 1919 to express his admiration, especially for L'Otage, which caused him some trouble, and to ask about the sacrifice of Sygne. This was the beginning of a correspondence between the writer and the young priest that would last eight years. In his Diary, Claudel does not mention Abbé Douillet, although he acknowledges here that he found in him the "priestly help" that he had lacked since the death of Abbé Fontaine. We can only give here a glimpse of these letters, which are sometimes very long].
Copenhagen September 24, 1919. Claudel reassures Douillet about his worries: "You are not the only one who has been troubled, intrigued, not to say scandalized, by reading The Hostage. Recently, I was attacked with unprecedented violence by a Jesuit from Montreal who accused me of having made a dangerous and perfidious attack on the Catholic faith! [In short, Sygne sacrifices herself: 1° to save the Pope 2° to save her host and to cleanse her cousin of the crimes he has committed by a monstrous act of violence, injustice and temerity (ancient and feudal sentiment) 3° out of pride (bad blood). [...] I did not want to represent a Saint but the victory of Grace over Pride. I was driven not by a preconceived idea but by a certain artistic logic"... November 1st (Douillet having questioned the obscurity of certain pages of Claudel).
"Perhaps Le Pain dur would seem clearer to you if I had left it with one of the titles I had chosen at first, 'Les Possédés' or 'l'Étrangère' [...]
I wanted to show a society from which God has withdrawn [...] There is some truth in what you reproach me for about the impression of trouble, of disquiet that my books leave. And this is partly intended. I don't want the reader to leave satisfied, but to take with him a spur and a stimulus. [I am not a saint or a monk. I am a man of the world and a poet, trying to make his salvation in the midst of a quantity of passions, temptations and battles; Grace shows itself to me not only as a principle of light, but as a principle of struggle, of violence, of slow and difficult purgation, in a refractory milieu provoking formidable reactions"... November 16, 1921, "at sea off the coast of Japan. He tells the Abbot about his preoccupations, the illness of his little boy, and returns to the apparent obscurity of his work. "I am going through a moment of disgust and sadness, and I ask myself once again the question that I have often asked myself: what is the point? Why write? Why all these books that are useful to so few people and whose production has stopped me on the road to perfection?"...
Tokyo 10 May 1922. Very long letter (8 pages in-4) about his work. "I could say first of all that a good part of my work is perfectly clear. It seems to me that The Announcement, The Hostage itself, Hard Bread, Corona, Proteus, Knowledge of the East are accessible to all. But I prefer to be frank and I confess that even my clearest works must leave in the mind of the reader a dull anxiety, the feeling that he has not exhausted the book, that the author has not allowed himself to be perfectly possessed [...] First of all, there are the purely external, superficial, verbal reasons.
I will pass over the form of the verse, which can only shock the peons. There are, moreover, the sudden jumps of ideas, the sudden changes of atmosphere, provoked by juxtaposed images, sublime and trivial.
But for me everything is good that serves to express myself. [...] The true Christian thought is that every work of God is not only good, but very good, not only in relation to us whom it recreates, but in relation to God whom it signifies, and just as its material usefulness results from the work of our body, its salutary significance results from the inquisition of our spirit. .... 24 January 1923. Claudel admits to being "deeply disgusted with literature. You probably know that about twenty years ago I wanted to enter the monastery of Ligugé. I have a kind of hope and premonition that the Good Lord will not let me die like a bourgeois in well-being and laziness"... 5 and 10 May 1925, Claudel, staying in Grenoble and then in Paris, regrets not having been able to meet Abbé Douillet.
Paris 19 August 1927. "When I look at myself and see the shamefully small amount of work I have done and what I owe to the various situations that have surrounded me, I feel that I have done something good.
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