Lettre autographe signée à Joseph Kessel
S.l., July 17, 1952.
1 1/2 pages, on his letterhead “Général de Gaulle.” Dated and signed, “C. de Gaulle.”
“In Au grand Socco, you have shown great talent. I congratulate you on it, glad to see flowing, strong and clear, the wellspring of ideas, images, colors and feelings that make you the great novelist and writer that you are. Know, my dear Kessel, that I have kept alive the memory of our meetings in those heroic times”…
Since the Liberation, Kessel had presented de Gaulle with each of his published books. The two men first met in London in January 1943, upon Kessel’s arrival on British soil. De Gaulle then entrusted him with a role on the editorial committee of La France Libre, in the weekly La Marseillaise, directed by François Quilici. Kessel’s previous book, published in 1950, had prompted this reply from de Gaulle: “My dear companion of the great years, let me tell you what interest and pleasure I found in reading Le Tour du malheur… Here you are again, with your power and magnificent talent…”
Since the Liberation, Kessel had presented de Gaulle with each of his published books. The two men first met in London in January 1943, upon Kessel’s arrival on British soil. De Gaulle then entrusted him with a role on the editorial committee of La France Libre, in the weekly La Marseillaise, directed by François Quilici. Kessel’s previous book, published in 1950, had prompted this reply from de Gaulle: “My dear companion of the great years, let me tell you what interest and pleasure I found in reading Le Tour du malheur… Here you are again, with your power and magnificent talent…”
The seven stories in this collection were written during the summer of 1951. Kessel had taken up residence on the island of Djerba, on the Gulf of Gabès, together with close companions: his partner Michèle O’Brien and his nephew, Maurice Druon. An enthusiastic first reader, Druon later traveled to Tangier, where he had himself taken directly to the city’s great souk, the Grand Socco. This “setting worthy of Graham Greene, attractive but nothing more” had, under Kessel’s pen, become “the Baghdad of the Thousand and One Nights and the Djemaa el-Fna square of Marrakech”; Druon wrote to his uncle: “My great Jef, I understand now, I have just been to the Grand Socco. You are a forger. In the manner of Homer!”
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