Paul Morand: The Man in a Hurry

There is something lovelier than Paris; it is nostalgia for Paris.

In the full ripeness of his years (fifty-seven), a man whose books flew from one success to another was unwisely approaching the Tarpeian Rock. You responded courageously with the writer’s supreme weapon: some masterpieces, Le Bazar de la Charité, Milady, Parfaite de Saligny, Fouquet and one of the greatest and most dramatic novels of the twentieth century: Le Flagellant de Séville. Venices would be the testament and farewell to the friends of your youth, to the ghosts, to a miracle of serene beauty, the city that overcomes everything that is ponderous:

In Venice, my insignificant being had its first lesson on the planet, as I emerged from classrooms in which nothing had been learnt.

There were a few of us who, in our early years, were able to recognize a memorable elder colleague who was threatened by the baseness of current events. Of those young friends, practically none remain apart from Jean d’Ormesson and myself.

For all that, the Journal inutile does not always spare us. There is something healthy about that and it reminds your friends of relativity. Fortunately we are no longer at an age when we wound each other with chilly words. Our warm caresses did not blind you and I can imagine, being restored to favour, the irritation with which you swept aside these caresses. Including my reply to your own 1975 letter whose ending you have probably forgotten:

… Jean d’Ormesson is on his way to 200,000 and nothing is going to stop him. Kléber is at France v. England. Solzhenitsyn did not care for Nabokov. He has turned his back on Russian exiles living abroad. For him you can only resist in your own country (what a justification for Vichy, by the way!). When are you coming? I’m going to make some brief visits to Vevey but it’s hard to leave a distressed woman who is on a protest strike against life. Cabanis’ book on Saint-Simon is a success, mainly because people haven’t read any of it.

P.S. I realize that from the start of this letter I’ve been using the informal tu. Would you mind if this slip of the pen became the rule? I admire your life together; a good team.

Tibi, semper, Morand.

* Morand is making a pun on the French words cavernes and casernes .

† A small town some twenty kilometres south-east of Paris.

‡ Members of the Académie française — the Immortels —are only forty in total and are elected to numbered seats or fauteuils on the death of a predecessor.

§ This was written in 2008. In 2014 only Jean d’Ormesson survives. Maurice Druon and Claude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009 and Félicien Marceau in 2012.