« Le Continent englouti »

This chapter would later be incorporated into the first book Gary published: L’Éducation européenne. The novel, whose action begins in September 1942 and ends in spring 1943, was written in the following months, that is during the summer and autumn of 1943. In a letter to Pierre Calmann of November 1944, Romain Gary refers to his novel under the title La Forêt engloutie — probably the title borne by the original manuscript, now lost. Only one extract was ever published in a periodical: this six-page text, entitled “Le Continent englouti,” which corresponds to chapter 17 of the novel; it is the famous passage containing the fable “les Bourgeois de Paris.”

This is the only pre-original edition of the text. The book would appear four months later, in December 1944, published by Cresset Press in London, under the title Forest of Anger. In La Promesse de l’aube, Romain Gary recounts the moment he first felt recognized as a writer: when he learned that his novel was to be published, as he returned from an air mission with his squadron of the Lorraine group. When he arrived in London in 1943, he did not speak a single word of English: his marriage in 1945 to Lesley Blanch allowed him to perfect his knowledge of the language, enabling him to become, in less than two years, perfectly bilingual.

Rare.