« Un avocat peut dire encore plus que Baudelaire
Unpublished text shedding light on what Vergès wished “to bring to light through [his] imaginary memories.”
He draws on Baudelaire's line “J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans,” from Les Fleurs du mal (“Spleen”), and interweaves three subjects that shaped his thinking in the last two decades of his life: memory, the law and literature.
Vergès evokes the fate of Tolstoy and the work of Jouhandeau, and the lawyers Isorni, Tixier-Vignancour and Albert Naud, who defended Pétain, Salan and Laval respectively, none of whom he can imagine “describing the dark side” of their client. For, Vergès writes, “the model for the lawyer transposing his experience is found in Stendhal,” who drew from a case tried in the assizes the argument of Le Rouge et le Noir, in which the fictional characters efface the real people, so that “only the novel of ambition in a commoner in the first half of the nineteenth century, 20 years after the death of Napoleon, remains.” From this the lawyer concludes “that a trial, by its very nature, is incapable of attaining the truth — often of the facts, always of the man.”
“A lawyer can say even more than Baudelaire, that he has more memories than if he were 1,000 years old, for the good reason that his own memories are mingled with those of his clients, and that his brain conceals more secrets than a great chest of drawers cluttered with balance sheets, verses, love letters, lawsuits, romances, with heavy locks of hair rolled up in receipts. Does his own life hold any interest? Generally no more than anyone else’s. And that is no doubt why, in telling their lives, lawyers tell only their professional lives. Their own lives they are content merely to live…”
From the library of Jacques Vergès (with stamp).