Lettre autographe signée [à Daragnès]

“My friend, here is chapter 2 (semi-draft) of Féerie (…). I need to cover about 80,000 words this way for a 600-page novel. Ah, if only I could spend my life washing dishes, I’d much prefer it! (…) I read the press notices about me, which are truly appalling. They are appalling in the sense that they show France no longer exists. Quite the contrary. That Guignols has arrived. The collaborationist press did not even mention it. I received only one hostile review, from De Lesdain, himself a seasoned Gestapo agent, in a weekly, where he violently reproached me for dealing with collaborators of the past instead of choosing novel subjects among terrorist atrocities and the horrors of the maquis…”

After eighteen months in Danish prisons, Céline had taken refuge on the shores of the Baltic Sea, at the home of his lawyer, Thorvald Mikkelsen. He resumed work on Féerie and on what would become Foudres et flèches, and kept up an extensive correspondence; a few close friends visited him there: Pierre Monnier, Daragnès, Henri Mahé…

Jacques de Lesdain, mentioned in this letter, is known chiefly for his activity under the Occupation, notably at L’Illustration, where he appeared on the masthead as “Political Editor” between October 1940 and August 1944. During those four years, he expounded his views by praising the “benefits” of collaboration in a “new Europe.” Shortly before the Liberation, he left Paris for a hotel in Sigmaringen and, according to André Brissaud, “lamented the fate of his fourteen trunks,” lost during the flight. He remained in the town dominated by the Hohenzollern castle until April 23, 1945 — eight months during which he continued his collaborationist activities, despite the intensified hatred following the defeat.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline — by then appointed physician to the French community across the Rhine — mentions Jacques de Lesdain again in a letter to Charles Deshayes dated August 24, 1948: “he arrived in Baden-Baden with 400 kilos of luggage. He occupied an apartment at the Hôtel Bären in Sigmaringen, furious, moreover, that he could not stay at the castle. His German wife, he adds, was engaged in a very active black market.” Céline also describes him as “an absolutely vile character, an utter scoundrel, an old Prussian civil-servant type. Never,” he adds, “have I seen or come close to such an unbridled pro-German propagandist.”

Such acrimony from Céline toward the journalist is partly explained by the lasting resentment Céline harbored against Jacques de Lesdain since the publication of Guignol’s band in 1944, as he explains here to Daragnès: “I received only one hostile review, from De Lesdain, himself a seasoned Gestapo agent, in a weekly he edited (…) where he reproached me ‘with violence’ for dealing with ‘nonsense of the past’ instead of choosing my novel subjects.” In the body of his review, published in Aspects on June 2, 1944, de Lesdain had written of Céline: “It is fortunate that he is inimitable,” lamenting “a few hundred pages crammed with crude descriptions, tirelessly repeated, without any grievances emerging in keeping with the anguish we are enduring.”

The friendship between the engraver Jean-Gabriel Daragnès (1886–1950) and Céline was not immediate. During the Occupation, Daragnès was wary of the “Gen Paul gang,” but Céline treated his mother “until the very last minute” (March 1941), and Daragnès never forgot his devotion.