Sous Verdun

A moving copy inscribed to the author’s maternal grandmother, Clotilde Pasquier, who married Florimond Balichon, a grocer in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, in 1869. Their only daughter, Camille Balichon, was born in 1870 and married Jacques Genevoix in 1889. That same year Florimond died, leaving his widow alone to run the grocery — a death that precipitated the young Genevoix couple’s move to Châteauneuf with their infant son Maurice, born the previous year in Décize.

The shop, now run by mother and daughter with the help of Jacques Genevoix — a business agent and clerk of the Justice of the Peace — allowed Clotilde Pasquier to devote more time to raising her grandson. After Camille’s sudden death in 1903, Genevoix was only twelve. His father, widowed and preoccupied, withdrew; the grocery was sold, and his grandmother became his sole guiding figure. It was she who oversaw the boy’s education, accompanied him through his studies, and encouraged his taste for literature, up to his admission to the hypokhâgne at Lycée Lakanal.

It was to this strong, demanding and devoted woman that Genevoix, with quiet modesty, presented this copy of Sous Verdun, his war account and literary debut. She died in 1919, just as Maurice Genevoix returned from the war, wounded and already a writer. He likely retrieved this volume from his father and kept it all his life as a discreet filial tribute — the testimony of a survivor and the first book, born in the trenches, of a grandson-writer, given to the woman to whom he owed so much.

Sous Verdun: A young student at the École normale supérieure, Maurice Genevoix joined the 106th Infantry Regiment in September 1914 and went to fight in the Argonne, notably at the Tranchée de Calonne, where he was seriously wounded six months later, on 25 April 1915, by three bullets — two in the arm and one in the chest. After seven months of treatment he returned to Paris, to the rue d’Ulm, and, encouraged by Paul Dupuy, secretary-general of the École normale supérieure, with whom he had corresponded at length throughout those six terrible months, he agreed to recount his experience at the front and published Sous Verdun in April 1916. It was followed by Nuits de guerre in May 1917, Au seuil des guitounes in September 1918, La Boue in February 1921, and finally Les Éparges in September 1923 — a body of work at once historical and literary, among the most striking ever written on the First World War.

Genevoix reconstructed his days at the front from an eight-month campaign diary (25 August 1914 to 25 April 1915); the first two volumes omit no day. Jean Norton Cru wrote of him: “these five volumes are not five different works; they are, properly speaking, the five volumes of a single work: the transcription and development of the author’s notebook … Among the writers of the war, Genevoix ranks first, without question … Genevoix has a genius for war narrative and his work is incomparable,” in his 1929 book Témoins, which discusses Genevoix’s five accounts. In writing them, Genevoix also drew on letters sent to his family, his father, his brother René, and above all those sent to Paul Dupuy at the rue d’Ulm: “What I had to keep from my own family,” he wrote in Jeux de glaces (1960), “I confided freely in these letters, with the concern to be truthful, to share without reserve.”

Sous Verdun was praised by critics: “It is Maupassant [to whom the writer devoted a dissertation while at the École normale supérieure] from behind the trenches,” enthused Le Journal des débats. “One sees the war, in all its horror and truth, utterly alive.” It was a critical success for Genevoix, whose book approached 10,000 copies sold and was considered a contender for the Prix Goncourt, before the publication of Barbusse’s Le Feu changed the outcome within a matter of weeks.

In December, two Goncourt prizes were to be awarded: the 1914 prize (previously unawarded) and the 1916 prize. “In two rounds of voting, the decision was confirmed by clear majorities: the 1916 Prix Goncourt went to Barbusse, eight votes to two, and the 1914 prize to Adrien Bertrand, nine votes to one, the sole dissenting vote — for Genevoix — cast by Octave Mirbeau. To justify their choice, critics hypocritically faulted the young normalien for having chosen a title [Sous Verdun] that suggested he would be writing about the great battle of 1916, when in fact his book recounted the fighting in the Meuse from August to October 1914. April’s favorite had been overtaken by a shooting star and a dying man.” (Jean-Yves Le Naour, “La Gloire et l’Oubli. Maurice Genevoix et Henri Barbusse, témoins de la Grande Guerre,” Histoire, 2020).

A fine copy of remarkable and moving provenance.

From the library of Maurice Genevoix (bookplate).