Vaincre à Olympie

The copy contains some thirty substantive and stylistic corrections spread throughout the volume, which served as the basis for the illustrated 1968 edition, published on the occasion of the Grenoble Winter Olympic Games. The novel was also adapted for television in 1977, starring Jean Marais, from a screenplay by Genevoix drawing on this text.

The original text was an early work, published in 1924 under the title Euthymos, a year before Raboliot. It is a foundational novel, in which Genevoix conjures a dreamed, heroic and harmonious Greece, celebrating the power of the body.

Its inspiration reaches deep into Genevoix’s own youth. As a pupil at the Lycée Pothier in Orléans, he distinguished himself in team sports, notably as fly-half for the Union Sportive du Lycée d’Orléans (USLO), champion of the Center-West region. There he earned the nickname “Fouinotte,” for “his eye and his skill in capturing the oval ball between the hookers’ feet.”

He continued his training at Lakanal, in preparatory classes, where gymnastics was compulsory. And when he entered the École normale supérieure in 1911, the subject of his “special question” for the entrance examination was, fittingly, “The Olympic Games.” He was then assigned to the Joinville battalion, a center of military sport and physical education, where he further perfected his mastery of the body.

Then came the war. In 1914, Jean Guitton wrote, “Genevoix is master of his body, capable, like a fine Olympic athlete, of commanding every muscle — already master, too, of language, of those words which are the inner muscles. He was a young Greek, as Plato imagined them.” Wounded and maimed in 1915, he permanently lost the athletic use of his body. Euthymos, and later Vaincre à Olympie, seem to embody this attempt, through literature, to reclaim a vanished youth and a shattered physical ideal.

The writing of Euthymos was completed in April 1924, a few weeks before the opening of the Paris Olympic Games (5 July 1924). The novel appeared in June, amid a highly charged symbolic and personal moment. A few weeks after this first publication, Genevoix withdrew to the Sologne: Raboliot was underway.

A fine copy of the definitive text, presented by Genevoix thirty-five years after its initial publication.

From the library of Maurice Genevoix, at “Les Vernelles” (bookplate).