(Paris) The manuscript of Death on credit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who was among those who reappeared in 2021, joined the collections of the National Library of France, the BnF announced on Thursday.
After returning to Céline’s beneficiaries, François Gibault and Véronique Chovin, it entered the BnF fund “by way of a donation in payment of inheritance taxes”, the institution indicated in a press release.
In August 2021, these rights holders revealed that some 6,000 handwritten pages by the collaborationist writer had resurfaced. He left them behind in June 1944, when leaving Paris for Germany.
Céline, until her death in 1961, claimed that these writings had been burned by her enemies. He is unaware that they were picked up and sheltered by a resistance fighter, Yvon Morandat.
At the beginning of the 1980s, he passed them on to a journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat. The instruction is to keep the secret as long as Céline’s widow, Lucette Destouches, is alive. It will be a long time: she died at 107, in 2019.
Jean-Pierre Thibaudat’s ambition was to transcribe the manuscripts. But he did not complete the work, and when he contacted the rights holders, they obtained from the courts that the manuscripts be seized and returned to them, and dismissed him.
François Gibault, 91, is a lawyer and writer close to Lucette Destouches, and Véronique Chovin, 71, was her confidante. They keep the rest of these thousands of sheets.
“In the Manuscripts department of the National Library of France, where it will be kept, the manuscript joins the most complete set of Céline manuscripts in the world,” said the BnF.
This includes those from Céline’s masterpiece, journey to the Edge of the Night (1932), and three other novels: Guignol’s band (1944), Magic for another time (1952) and From one castle to another (1957).
Death on credit is Céline’s second novel, in 1936, which recounts the youth of the hero of journey to the Edge of the Night, Bardamu, inspired by that of the author. Its critical and commercial failure greatly affected Céline.
Another manuscript of Death on credit exists, divided in two, between a private collection and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. “The BnF manuscript is therefore the only and most complete preserved in France and made available to researchers,” underlined the BnF.