Charge d’âme

Five years after the publication of The Gasp, Romain Gary decided to bring out a French version of the text.

After describing the dust jacket illustrations to Claude Gallimard in precise detail, Gary told a journalist: “I am about to turn sixty-four, and I enjoy life as I never have before, because I have gotten rid of a certain number of grimaces. […] I can take off my trousers in public without feeling either brilliant or ridiculous.” Nothing, indeed, could hold the author back, and he entered into a frank, grimace-free dispute with his publisher over a press kit put together with no common sense at all: “My dear fellow, this is unbelievable, what a mess. […] I wrote a special preface. Such ineptitude borders on sabotage. I want an explanation. […] Damn it! Who made this irreparable blunder?” (letter to Robert Gallimard). The “blunder” in question was announcing Charge d’âme too early as the sequel to Frère Océan — something Gary had in fact announced in Pour Sganarelle. Be that as it may, the novel continues from La Tête coupable, another novel first written in English and likewise part of the Frère Océan cycle, of which Charge d’âme is unquestionably the sequel: we find in Charge d’âme the character of Marc Mathieu, the French scientist living in hiding in Tahiti whose research allowed France to acquire the hydrogen bomb.

But Gary wanted to detach it from that cycle, as he made clear a few days later to another member of the Gallimard family, Claude: “[…] I am put on the market with no regard whatsoever for the event. And who is responsible for managing, for bringing back into view, the whole of my twenty-five books? No one. It is practically like a legal deposit. That is not how I understand publishing. […] Who gave Le Figaro the subject of my book, which is completely wrong…?”