Les Cerfs-volants
One of 450 hors commerce copies reserved for the Compagnons de la Libération, this copy justified and signed by the author: “[Imprimé spécialement pour] Georges Hugo. Romain Gary.”
Gary’s final novel bears a simple dedication: “À la mémoire” (“To memory”). Though set against the backdrop of Nazism and the Occupation, this last romance is entirely guided by the love the author had despaired of ever finding. As in Clair de femme (said to have been inspired by a discreet affair with Romy Schneider), Les Cerfs-volants returns obsessively to this “illumination” of love; on the book’s publication, Gary confided that he “did not always manage to apply to [his] life the precepts of [his] books, but this whole book is the story of people who do not know how to despair.” A few months later, on 2 December 1980, he took his own life, a little more than a year after Jean Seberg.
A fine copy of the special printing for the Compagnons de la Libération: Gary, who had at one point agreed to write a book for the Musée de l’Ordre de la Libération, found himself unable to do so, but offered instead to fund a special printing of his novel devoted to the Resistance — Les Cerfs-volants, then about to be published — for the Compagnons. 450 copies were printed, preceded only by 15 copies on Hollande and 25 on Arches paper, each individually made out to a surviving Compagnon.
Georges Hugo was one of them: born on 3 April 1915 in Dijon and died on 1 March 1984 in Pont-d’Ain, he was a French army officer, the son of an officer killed in action in 1917. A former pupil of the Prytanée militaire, he entered Saint-Cyr in 1935 and graduated two years later as second lieutenant, posted to the 3rd Colonial Infantry Regiment in August 1937. He was in Niger when the armistice of June 1940 was announced: refusing to accept defeat, he escaped as early as 23 June, passing through Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Cameroon and Pointe-Noire to join the Free French Forces in July 1940. Promoted to captain in September 1941, he was assigned to the BM 11 from its creation and took part with his battalion, within the 1st Free French Division, in the Libyan and Egyptian campaigns, notably at Himeimat (El Alamein), earning numerous citations — and wounds. He returned to the continent in September 1944 and took part in the campaign to liberate French territory. Promoted to colonel in 1962, he was then assigned to the Army General Staff; in 1970 he received his brigadier general’s stars and was appointed deputy to the general commanding the 3rd Military Region.
A fine copy.