La Dentellière

Published in February by Georges Lambrichs in his series “Le Chemin,” this slim 177-page novel, with no particular ambition for the Prix Goncourt or the Prix Renaudot, made its way quietly onto the literary scene. Armand Lanoux, and above all Raymond Queneau, immediately fell for the character of Pomme and set in motion the process that would lead to the book’s literary triumph.

It won the Prix Goncourt on the sixth ballot of the 1974 vote, by six votes to four for René-Victor Pilhes (L’Imprécateur). On the previous ballot, Pilhes and Lainé had five votes each. Hervé Bazin, president of the Académie Goncourt, refused to use his casting vote: “Let us leave it to democracy to decide.” On the following ballot, Michel Tournier joined the supporters of Pascal Lainé, and the matter was settled.

Pascal Lainé suddenly found himself famous, without realizing how burdensome that fame would become: “It’s the little daisy that hides the forest,” Lainé would later admit, an elegant way of saying that his most famous novel would overshadow all his other books. “When you have more than forty titles to your name, you have the right to think in terms of a body of work. My work as a writer is not limited to a single book. But let us be clear: I do not disown La Dentellière, I am not ungrateful, I am a happy Goncourt winner. At the time, I sold 330,000 copies in the trade edition, 500,000 through the France Loisirs book club. I have also lost count of the translations, and, year in year out, I have had two paperback printings. It is a book,” he added, “that teachers very quickly took up, both in France and abroad. It served as a statistical benchmark for the use of certain words.”