Roger NIMIER (1925-1962). Autograph manuscript,... - Lot 138 - Ader

Roger NIMIER (1925-1962). Autograph manuscript, about the election of Paul Morand, [April 1958]; 5 pages in-fol. on squared paper with file holes, with erasures and corrections (printer's marks). On the opposition of certain academics to Paul Morand's candidacy for the Académie française. This column, full of raging verve, appeared in the magazine Arts. "When the current Director [André François-Poncet], who had never had the opportunity to speak so violently in front of Hitler, had finished his harangue, the perpetual Secretary [Georges Lecomte] looked at him with dismay. Through his channel, eleven members of the Académie Française protested against the candidacy of a writer, Paul Morand, and declared, a month before voting, that they were rejecting this colleague "... A coterie tried to set itself up as a directoire...". Is it the left hand or the right hand? Let us look at the petitioners. Any obedient reader of François Mauriac's Bloc-Notes would consider Jules Romains, the editorialist of L'Aurore, to be a traitor and a reactionary. Mr. Robert d'Harcourt, like Professor Valery-Radot, are men of order and do not make a fuss about it. Georges Duhamel writes boldly in Le Figaro with an intrepidity that makes one clap one's hands, Me Garçon is the Goncourt's lawyer. One would not finish describing so much patriotism, such boldness, and how we saved France, and how we are cursed poets "... However, this " dictatorial essay " of the eleven, " whose head can be guessed, if we only see their feet ", reinforces Morand's position: "Those who weren't his friends felt that they would disgrace themselves, which is one thing, and lose the Academy, which is another, by submitting to the collegial leadership. For, they say to themselves, François Mauriac is an exquisite man, the very spirit; yet his whims are only whims; yet he will have them all his life. Besides, who is he really, this Paul Morand that we have always known, from island to island, from success to success, from Bugatti to embassy - and who has been missing for ten years? »