Georges BERNANOS (1888-1948). Autograph manuscript signed, W - Lot 6

Georges BERNANOS (1888-1948). Autograph manuscript signed, Written November 2 [1928]; 9 pages in-fol. Superb text against the "soft monsters", Ernest Renan and Anatole France, written on the Day of the Dead. [This violent article, written in 1928 for the Revue Universelle, was rejected; it was collected in Le Crépuscule des vieux]. "Le bonhomme France and le bonhomme Renan are dead: you don't see me otherwise upset. Having said that, what truly human heart would not wish for them silence, and the dignity expected from this horizontal position, the first sincere attitude of these two tragic coquettes. God forbid that I should once have remained insensitive to the macabre pathos of the dance they did! Already more than half corpses, we saw them shuffle their weary old legs, sketch out steps and pirouettes, and still give joy, pain and love an exhausted nique. If their broken laughter sounded false, how obscene their tears were"... Pudeur would have us leave them to their eternal nuptials with death, if they weren't followed by their beau-esprit friends, vain little virtuosos, comparable to rodents. Bernanos quotes Jacques Boulenger, Henri Massis and Frédéric Lefèvre of Nouvelles littéraires, ironizing the remarks of these "gentlemen of elegant humanism and cultivated dandyism [...] We must tell these survivors: they are no longer, alas! fighting against fashion or envy; they are fighting against time; they will not loosen its jaws. Whether they resurrect the good man France, or the good man Renan, that would still be as vain as painting them, for one would have to resurrect with them a whole abolished public, a whole world"... He ridicules their adolescent background, an intellectual Donjuanism... "There are a few of us in the world who no longer know how to play with our souls, as with a familiar cat: it has grown, it begs for a real embrace. It's ridiculous to be an essayist until death. Being an essayist is Cherubin's business"...