Lettre autographe à Roger Nimier

On 3 March 1955, Jean Cocteau was elected to the Académie française. He succeeded Jérôme Tharaud in seat 31, obtaining 17 votes against 11 for Jérôme Carcopino on the first ballot. Cocteau was officially received under the Coupole by André Maurois on the following 20 October.

Only thirteen days after his election, he wrote to Roger Nimier and immediately turned the institution into a play on words:

“Je ne suis pas solide et je crois que mon fauteuil sera très vite libre. Du reste on aurait dû me donner un vrai fauteuil. Je dormirai un peu.”

The academic “fauteuil” (seat), vacated by the death of its occupant, becomes under his pen an actual armchair in which the new Immortal might fall asleep. But the joke is a dark one, for Cocteau had just come through a physically difficult period. Struck by a heart attack in 1954, he had been hospitalized and then convalescent. As late as 2 January 1955, writing to Sartre after his stay in the clinic, he said he had finally emerged from this period and was seeking to see his friends again. And when he already imagined his academic seat “very quickly free,” Cocteau’s humor rested on a reality he had just personally experienced: a seat at the Académie only becomes free through the death of its occupant. This preoccupation would follow him all the way to his official reception, since seven months later, on 20 October 1955, in his reception speech at the Académie, Cocteau would return precisely to this succession of deaths through which a seat is occupied and then freed.

Roger Nimier was then one of the most brilliant figures of the younger generation of French writers. Novelist of Le Hussard bleu, critic and columnist, soon to be associated with the “Hussards,” he belonged to a generation of writers whom Cocteau observed with interest and with whom he maintained a friendly correspondence.

Another letter from Cocteau to Nimier, dated 30 October 1954, had already enthusiastically praised one of his texts: “On ne dessine pas mieux dans l’écriture. Grande joie de vous lire, grande joie de vous l’écrire.”