Belonging to the last generation that grew up before the internet, I still have dreams of that old world, in which I find manuscripts or rare books hidden in dusty old bookstores. You will understand that the incredible story of the found manuscripts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline has excited me to the highest degree in recent years.
You don’t have to be an avid reader of Céline to be fascinated by this affair, which resembles a historical thriller set in the middle of war. In addition, there is the romantic side of yellowed paper and handwriting that no work lost on a USB stick will be able to achieve.
I thought I had read everything about the multiple twists and turns of this saga told in the newspapers, but I couldn’t find a better summary of the affair than with the podcast A special story by France Culture entitled “The Found Manuscripts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline”, a documentary in four episodes by Romain Weber and Yvon Croizier. The protagonists of this treasure hunt tell their versions of the facts, with the added bonus of quotes from Céline, who never stopped lamenting the rest of his life about the loss of his manuscripts… which he could have recovered, let’s learn!
It all began when Céline, feeling the hot soup at the Liberation and not wanting to end up shot with other collaborators, fled on June 17, 1944, leaving behind furniture and papers at 4, rue Girardon, in Paris.
The apartment will be searched and for a time, a certain Oscar Rosembly will be suspected of having stolen the manuscripts. However, it would rather be Yvon Morandat, an important resistance fighter, who would have kept the 6000 pages, some attached with clothespins, as was the writer’s habit. They contain in particular the unpublished War, London And King Krogol’s Will which Gallimard quickly published from 2022, making Céline a back-to-school author 60 years after her death…
Among his many enemies, real or imaginary, Céline singled out Morandat, “a man who owes everything to Hitler,” he wrote full of rage, accusing him of having “made a child” in his bed while he was in exile. . Rather forgotten today, Morandat reappears thanks to Céline’s manuscripts, underlines the historian Laurent Douzou, who cannot help but see in it an irony of history.
The manuscripts vegetated in trunks until the 1980s, when Morandat’s descendants wanted to get rid of this hot potato by passing it on to Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, then a journalist at Release. On one condition: they must not be made public as long as Céline’s widow, Lucette Destouches, is alive, because we do not want her to receive a penny from this literary treasure, which is worth its weight in gold. However, Lucette Destouches died at 107 years old in 2019! This is the only reason we didn’t know about these manuscripts before.
And during all these years, Thibaudat says he feared that a theft or fire would destroy the pages, but admits to having experienced the exhilaration of deciphering them, alone in his corner for years, when everyone was unaware of their existence.
“They were able to take all that away from me and treat me with contempt, I don’t care at all, because I had this unique experience in the world,” he explains with a laugh.
Thibaudat kept his word, because he himself was the son of resistant parents. “There were never any Céline books at home. It was trash. I had the manuscripts of a scumbag, a collaborator, an anti-Semite, therefore a scumbag. »
When Lucette Destouches died, he contacted the co-rights of the work, the lawyer François Gibault and Véronique Robert-Chovin who, at first, did not believe in it. Things go well at first, but we don’t agree on where the manuscripts should be deposited and things quickly get worse: a complaint is filed against Thibaudat for complicity in receiving stolen property, but he refuses to reveal his sources to the police. , who count the sheets one by one on the floor.
In the fourth episode, we discover that upon Céline’s return to France in 1951, Morandat contacted her to offer to recover her furniture and papers, but the furious writer wanted nothing to do with paying the guard’s costs. -furnishes and believes that what remains of his manuscripts is of no interest.
“He is in martyrology, he is incapable of going back,” believes the writer Emmanuel Pierrat. According to journalist Jérôme Dupuis, he is no longer the same man returning from exile, and he will revel in his role of victim until the end. “If all of a sudden, a nice gentleman, also resistant, came to bring her manuscripts and her furniture, perhaps that would break this desire for Céline’s magnificent novel against the whole world,” he explains.
This treasure hunt is almost over, even if there are still Celinians who believe that other manuscripts will still be discovered. For some, Gallimard rushed the publication of incomplete works before Céline fell into the public domain in 2032. It is obvious that these 6000 pages are worth several million euros and that their publication brought in a nice sum, since the new of their rediscovery has gone around the world. But the bickering around them is likely to continue, because Céline’s great-grandson, Guillaume Grenet, descendant of Colette Destouches, the writer’s only child born from his union with Édith Follet, intends to pursue Gallimard and the rights holders. It wouldn’t surprise me if this whole adventure ended in a movie one day.