CLAUDEL Paul (1868-1955) [AF 1946, 13e f].

Lot 34
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CLAUDEL Paul (1868-1955) [AF 1946, 13e f].
Autograph MANUSCRIT, [Remerciement à mes amis de Belgique], October 25, 1946; 7 pages and a quarter in-fol. with erasures and corrections. Speech delivered in Brussels on December 11, 1946 for the presentation of his academician's sword. [The text was published in Le Figaro littéraire of December 14, 1946, and collected in Discours et Remerciements (1947)]. Claudel speaks of his dual vocation as diplomat and poet. "It is not my fault if the little provincial, unmannered and unconnected, who one day came to knock with a suspicious and fearful finger on the door of the august buildings of the Quai d'Orsay, suddenly saw himself, without knowing exactly how, snatched up, sucked in, snatched away, by a career as a consul and diplomat which was to last 46 years and take him through all the cantons of the planet. However, at that very moment I had a vocation as scandalous as it was unmistakable as a poet. He evokes his "old master, Stéphane MALLARMÉ", his tedious work of copying dispatches, then his decisive meeting with "the most precious, the most reliable, the most clear-sighted and the most affectionate of brothers, Philippe BERTHELOT. [Philippe made me an ambassador, and, as far as I have heard, no more intolerable than any other"... He refers to the "fabulous year 1890" and to the publication of his first books: "what bricks more drowned in the pond of the general inattention than these anonymous and forcible books where under the sign of the independent Art I inscribed my first protests, Tête d'or, of which your great poet Maeterlinck was almost the only one to notice, the City!" He speaks of the upheavals he witnessed during his seventy-eight years, and of his conversion: "Everything was full, the stomach of the possessors as well as the brains of the philosophers: full, stuck, stuffed, tense, dilated to the point of congestion and to the point of bloating. A general bad conscience that translated into a kind of desperate confidence in the brute fact and in the material force. As for me, poor little boy fresh from my province, the atmosphere that one breathed in Paris in those sad years had overwhelmed me with horror and despair, and a certain Christmas afternoon at Notre-Dame had allowed me to breathe a few breaths of purer air... Then came the war of 1914: "A magnificent thing happened to me; it is that I met the living God [] I was right to believe in light and joy. It is not my fault that God exists!
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