Le Mas Théotime

In August 1940, writing from Rabat, Morocco, two months after the French defeat, Henri Bosco began work on Le Mas Théotime. As early as March 1940, he had told his friend Noël Vesper that he had the idea for a “psychological detective novel,” to be entitled “Les Ramasses” — a reference to an event that had taken place at the house of his Lourmarin friend Sylvain Paris, who bore that name. The narrative was built on the theme of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, but its deeper inspiration came from the debacle of June 1940: “I was in my house in Morocco. What was to be done? In great disasters, I believe each of us must first try to accomplish his own task. […] As a novelist, I resolved at once to begin a novel. The subject, or rather the theme, imposed itself on me: we had been dispossessed of our land, and it was of that land that I would speak.” (Henri Bosco, quoted by Georges Raillard in En Provence chez Henri Bosco, 1959).

Completed on 12 July 1941, an extract appeared in La Revue universelle on 10 April 1942, but the book was not published until June 1945, by the man who had just published L’Armée des ombres and who, demobilized in December 1944, was attempting a publishing venture in Paris: Edmond Charlot, Albert Camus’s longtime publisher. Bosco and Camus would later meet again in Lourmarin, near the château that Bosco had done so much to help restore.

The book was awarded the Prix Renaudot in December 1945: “The Prix Goncourt having gone to M. Jean-Louis Bory, for Mon village à l’heure allemande, whose merit and quality we have already noted, the compensatory Théophraste Renaudot prize has fallen to M. Henri Bosco: rightly so, for his novel, Le Mas Théotime, is a remarkable work. I have lately given considerable attention to the literature of wartime testimony, and shall no doubt continue to follow and return to it for some time yet; all the more reason to rejoice at finding that imaginative literature is not dead, and that even today topicality is not the sole condition for a new book’s interest.” (Émile Henriot, in Le Monde, 20 December 1945).

The manuscript is preserved in the Fonds Henri Bosco at the Université Côte-d’Azur, Nice.

A precious and rare deluxe copy, in perfect condition, remarkably bound by Pierre-Lucien Martin.

From the library of Raoul Simonson (bookplate).