JUIN (Alphonse). 1888-1967. Marshal of France.... - Lot 49 - Aguttes

JUIN (Alphonse). 1888-1967. Marshal of France. 5 L.T.S. of which with aut. subscription to Michel de Saint-Pierre. Paris, 1957-1959-1961. 7 ff. in-4, header in corner. Beautiful correspondence on the commitment of the writer. 1957. Yes, a writer must be the witness of his time. It is besides the most tempting and the most widespread vocation because one would not know how to conceive that a writer, who, by definition, is a being endowed with curiosity and receptivity, can completely abstain from his environment and his time. Whatever effort he makes to escape it, he is always drawn back to it by the obligations imposed by an increasingly rigorous social subservience, and, under these conditions, it is only natural that he should seek compensation for himself by applying his precious faculties of observation and writing to the present which he cannot escape. Oh, I know that there are some who react by taking a step back; that there are others who distance themselves from the present by going beyond it, as they go beyond death itself to scrutinize the infinite. These are privileged people, but they are very useful. In the field of history, in particular, hindsight is essential to sort out the testimonies. Do we not witness in troubled times, full of events and passions, all sorts of attempts to distort history at the very moment it is being made? That is to say all the interest which is attached to the testimonies returned on a lived time and the best emanate from novelists or memorialists. There is no current writer who does not know that what will survive in his work, it is not so much the instantaneous itself, the taken on the live, that the share of eternal with which he will match it. And this concern is likely to distort somewhat the value of the testimony. 1959. About his works on Turkey, and on The Whispers of Satan or The prodigious life of the Curé d'Ars which he has just finished reading. I said to you, one day, that the writers who deviate from current events by going beyond them are privileged. You have known, while doing the work of a historian, how to bring to life and endear the figure of this Curé who was not like the others, lost in a Voltairian and skeptical world. 1961. About Michel de Saint-Pierre's last essay, La Nouvelle race.