La Chute

Noëlle Hervé was a candidate for the Prix du Palais Royal in 1950, following the publication of her first book, Le fil d’Ariane. She was rejected in the final round by a vote of 7 to 2, ostensibly because she was a naturist and was known to recite her poems on stage in the nude. The jury was chaired by Colette and included, among others, Jean Cocteau and Jean Paulhan. It is not known who the two supporting votes came from. The young woman had previously appeared on the cover of several glamour magazines, such as Paris-Hollywood (no. 89, 1949) and Vintage magazine (no. 267, 1949, and no. 216, 1948); the latter issue even devoted a page to her poems.

Abandoning poetry, Noëlle Hervé published L’Enfant du vieux monde in 1955, which appeared in May in the Espoir series edited by Albert Camus. The title attracted some attention, confirming Camus’s wish to open his series to a surprising and new voice — a female one, moreover, in the literary landscape of the time.

Two reviews of the novel appeared in Combat, both excellent, not to say enthusiastic. Despite this, Noëlle Hervé’s career, whether literary or artistic, appears to have ended at this point.

This was the second-to-last title Camus edited in the series (the last being René Ménard’s La Condition poétique, in December 1959). Only four further titles by Simone Weil would follow, and the series ended in 1966. L’Enfant du vieux monde, together with Violette Leduc’s L’Asphyxie (1946), Thérèse Milhaud’s Le Même bateau (1950) and Jean Bloch-Michel’s Le Témoin, are the only novels among the 29 titles the series would comprise.