Journal d’un poète

In 1936, at the age of thirteen and a half, Blondin was a boarder at the Marist school in Senlis. His parents, little inclined to assume their responsibilities, had sent him to boarding school at the age of nine. But it was at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he remained an average student but a keen reader, that he began to write and discovered his vocation. This, at least, is what he suggests in his private diary, kept daily and reproduced here in facsimile. One must “look at things as farce,” he argued. From this early age, he preferred friendship to honors, panache to ambition, and carelessness to reason, writing to stitch back together the pieces of a life quietly falling apart: “Very soon,” he confided, “it became clear to me that I would be less a novelist of adventures than of misadventures.”