He has always played two scores at the same time, a rigodon from Nivernais and an air by Erik Satie taken from a Parisian salon. Between the two, the train goes by at a hundred miles an hour. Jules Renard has just left his chair in mayor of the small village of Chitry-les-Mines for the one, more opulent, of theGoncourt Academy.
And always for Jules Renard these two pieces of music in mind; la Nièvre, his wife, Marinette and their two children, the peasants whom he calls “his fierce brothers” the trees, the fields and the companies of partridges… The locomotive howls, terminus Gare de Lyon… Paris 1900 here we are: the little actresses of the conservatory, the cocottes, the demi-mondaines, the theater, the literary circles, the cafes, the brasseries, the friends: Tristan Bernard, Capus, Allais, Guitry father and son. But Jules Renard, still torn, can’t bring himself to do it: “It is in the heart of the city that we write the most beautiful pages on the countryside“. A dry, precise, smudge-free journal, scalpel in handall to please François Mitterrand who had made it his bedside book.
With his very Parisian plays (“The Household Bread”; “The Pleasure of Breaking Up”), with his country books(“Poil de Garotte” and “Ragote”), Jules Renard became the gentleman of Paris for some, “the peasant of the Danube” for others and above all a successful author.
14 years after the death of the author, in 1924, a young journalist publisher André Gillois, visits Madame Renard who entrusts him, in part, with her husband’s diary. A third of the pages of the manuscript were burned by the widowhurt to have discovered the ferocious descriptions written by Jules Renard, at the same time as his frivolous passion for young actresses. “Even the best of us has a few minor assassinations to blame ourselves for” he writes, as if to clear himself.
Thus, Jules’ diary, even amputated by a third, remains a pinnacle of French literatureNivernaise and Parisian.
Add two letters to Paris and it’s paradise