Les Stances à Sophie
Presentation copy inscribed by the author: “À Gérard Bauër, c'est le premier qui sort des presses, il est pour vous, très inconditionnellement et avec toute ma vraie amitié, C. Rochefort,” and on the verso of the flyleaf: “Je vous embrasse...”
Mounted at front: the author's visiting card, “Je ne vais pas vous téléphoner, mais vous, vous pouvez, à PYR.04.15 désormais. Amitié, C. Rochefort.”
Christiane Rochefort’s third novel, Les Stances à Sophie is a social satire, and, as often with Rochefort, a precisely aimed one. As Jacqueline Piatier astutely observed in Le Monde upon publication, “the roles are distributed with no pretense of objectivity. The males are wrong. The bourgeois are wrong. Capitalism is wrong, since it is the use it makes of progress, not progress itself, that Christiane Rochefort condemns (…) She has treated herself to a fine dinner of male heads. And for us, she provides a treat. It is spicy, of course: plenty of coarse language, a few risqué situations. Better to say so at once, to avoid any shock. Christiane Rochefort owes nothing — in style or in ideas — to Chateaubriand. She belongs to the posterity of Céline: not his vision, but the little tune that slips perfectly through this long spoken-written prose. The voice that rings out here can be heard. What is this novel missing? If one is looking for a Goncourt, here is one, and its brilliance will not be fleeting.”
The book did not enjoy that posterity: it was dropped from the final September shortlist, which crowned Quand la mer se retire by Armand Lanoux. Gérard Baüer had been a member of the Académie Goncourt since 1948. Two years later, he would devote a long essay to Rochefort in the special issue the journal Livres de France dedicated to her (no. 9, December 1965).
From the library of G. Bauër (bookplate).