Léviathan

This copy is enriched by a fascinating testimony to the way Julien Green conceived and “drew” his characters — he whose first vocation was painting. In his Souvenirs of 1925, a line about a visit to the Louvre with François Mauriac dwells on this other passion: “I am not certain that Mauriac was very fond of painting. He loved it when he thought of it. He loved it as a man of letters.” He adds: “As for me, I thought of it constantly.”

When Courbet painted his unsparing portrait of Madame Andler, manageress of the brasserie on the rue Hautefeuille in Paris, he could not have known that forty years later a young novelist would refine its contours, and that the portrait of his Madame Longe-Andler would bring him success: “She was dressed in black taffeta, her bust tightly bound in a bodice that imprisoned the neck up to the chin, but left bare, beneath flounces of guipure, round, plump wrists. An amethyst on her right hand, a brooch at the top of her chest betrayed a concern for elegance, but the fabric around the waist bore four or five ugly mends that admitted to hard times and a poorly concealed embarrassment.”

Green received the Académie française prize for this book, which Gide, “out of the blue,” suggested should be brought to the screen, and had him write a script, since “in your work there is a forward plunge that cinema would render marvelously.” A film indeed followed, in 1962. Léviathan remains one of the major books of the writer’s early career. On 16 November 1972, as he spoke his first words beneath the Coupole, Mauriac came up again: “Gentlemen, François Mauriac said to me one day, some five or six years ago: ‘I see you at the Académie.’ To which I replied, incredulous: ‘I did not know you had visions.’” This witticism, he tells us, was not to his interlocutor’s taste…

From the library of Vincent Morel (bookplate).