Charge d’âme

Five years after the publication of The Gasp, Romain Gary decided to produce a French version of the text. Having described the dust-jacket illustrations to Claude Gallimard in careful detail, he told a journalist: “I am about to turn sixty-four and I enjoy life as I never have before, because I have rid myself of a number of grimaces. (…) I can take off my trousers in public without feeling brilliant or ridiculous.”

Nothing, indeed, could restrain the author any longer, who engaged in a decidedly unmincing dispute with his publisher over a press dossier he considered nonsensical: “My dear fellow, this is unbelievable, what a mess. (…) I wrote a special preface. Such ineptitude borders on sabotage. I want an explanation. (…) Damn it! Who made this irreparable blunder?” (letter to Robert Gallimard). The “blunder” in question was to have announced, too early, that Charge d’âme was the sequel to Frère Océan — something Gary himself had announced in Pour Sganarelle. Be that as it may, the novel does continue directly from La Tête coupable, another novel first written in English and likewise part of the Frère Océan cycle, to which Charge d’âme is undoubtedly the sequel: we find again in Charge d’âme the character of Marc Mathieu, the French scientist living in hiding in Tahiti whose research had enabled France to acquire the hydrogen bomb.

But Gary wanted to detach the book from that cycle, as he made clear a few days later to another Gallimard at the publishing house, Claude: “(…) I am being sent out onto the market with no concern for the event itself. And who is responsible for managing, for bringing back my twenty-five books as a whole? No one. It is practically like a legal deposit. I do not see publishing that way. (…) Who gave Le Figaro the completely false subject of my book…?”