La Lanterne des morts
Signed presentation inscription: “Au bon romancier de la Loire, à Maurice Genevoix, cordial hommage. Hubert Fillay, Blois, 19 août 22.”
A writer from the Sologne, born in Bracieux, near Chambord, Hubert Fillay was one of the most fervent champions of regionalism in the Loir-et-Cher. A member of the Blois bar, he founded the review Le Jardin de la France, then, in 1922, the association L’École de la Loire, bringing together artists and writers around the identity of the Loire Valley. Maurice Genevoix was naturally associated with it.
This collection of poems, published the very year L’École de la Loire was founded, pays tribute to the symbolism of the lanternes des morts, funerary lanterns once found at the entrance to cemeteries and on tombs. Several poems are devoted to soldiers killed at the front, in a vein both elegiac and local. Fillay probably presented this copy to Genevoix after reading Rémi des Rauches, published shortly before, which marked a regionalist turning point in the novelist’s work.