Binche-Ana : Agnès
Copy justified by the author: “2/8, M. J. 1932.”
Autograph note: “Ma mère avait une personnalité qui lui permettait de n’être jamais cette prisonnière des images ou des portraits que je faisais d’elle dans mes livres. Marcel Jouhandeau.”
“I love you too much,” someone once told me, “to want to know you. I would be too afraid of being disappointed.” As for me, it is only through disappointment that I love; indeed no one could ever disappoint me: once everything has been said again, there remains something more to say again, but even more to love. It is tempting to move this epigraph from Chroniques maritales and inscribe it in letters of gold above the opening words of Élise. It would cast a different light on Élise and Marcel Jouhandeau, on their mythical and exaggerated domestic quarrels as rendered by the pen of Monsieur Godeau, and on this portrait in the form of notes, composed largely in the year of his marriage.
One may speak of tenderness in describing the author’s feelings toward Léon-Paul Fargue. In a letter received by the poet, then gravely ill, shortly before his death, Jouhandeau closes with these words: “(…) you will surely allow me to embrace you gently and to whisper in your ear that there are few faces left, alas, like yours (…) which keep poor men from believing themselves already descended, still living, into the Hell of irremediable stupidity.”
A fine binding with framed decoration by Pierre-Lucien Martin.