Les Innocents
Presentation copy inscribed by Carco: “à Camille Bloch, le plus charmant des éditeurs, son ami F. Carco, janvier 1917.”
Chapter XXIV was censored, as was the last line of page 184: in this copy, the author has added the missing text by hand at this point.
“Les Innocents was born on 15 February 1915, when a young Englishwoman [Katherine Mansfield] left London and her fiancé to join her lover [Francis Carco], then stationed in France, at Gray, in postal sector 45 […]. The book very nearly never appeared, owing to wartime publishing difficulties and, above all, censorship. On its publication in 1916 by La Renaissance du Livre, the unwholesome atmosphere pervading the novel shocked the censorship board, which ordered cuts to the text. Once again, Carco was criticized for his boldness in depicting the dangerous classes […]” (Jean-Jacques Bedu and Gilles Freyssinet, Francis Carco. Romans, Lafont, 2004, pp. 109 & 111).
The book therefore appeared with, from the third part onward, one entire chapter censored (chapter XXIV), a second half-censored, and a number of sentences cut here and there. In this copy, Francis Carco has restored the first censored sentence, which introduces all the sections concerning the battalion: “j’mi engage au Bataillon.”
Talvart notes that copies on Hollande and Japanese paper were printed “for the author, without limitation statement, in which the suppressed passages were restored, either by hand or by means of tipped-in slips. In the trade edition, blanks are left, each suppressed passage or blank page being marked ‘[Censuré].’”