Renaud CAMUS - Autograph letter signed to Madeleine Chapsal.

Renaud CAMUS (1946-)

Autograph letter signed to Madeleine Chapsal.

Four large pages in-4°. Plieux. January 25, 2006

“Dear Commander (e?), will you forgive me for having taken your book to age a little long and for only thanking you for it now? I did not want to write to you about it without having read it with all the attention it deserves doubly, because it comes from you and because we are necessarily, unfortunately, captive to its subject. But the first reason takes precedence over the second, so that I withdraw "alas", and that growing old between your sentences is, if not entirely a pleasure, non exageriamo, at least an experience of wisdom, and sweet as such . I would have a thousand things to say to you and a thousand reasons to admire you (I dare not write, Madam, to love you). Allow me this time to highlight just one of your reflections, which I find wonderfully accurate and profound. It's the one you make about letters–and especially love letters, I presume, but not only that, that we only really understand twenty, thirty or fifty (years) later. I had experienced it a thousand times, but without realizing it. Time is the great hermeneut. How clear everything is with him! So clear, and so deep... It is one of the great pleasures of age, you underline it wonderfully, this relief that it puts between sentences, starting of course with those of our life. Everything begins to resemble those photographs on glass plates, as you remember, which we looked at in special cameras and which carved out the space in successive, well-defined planes, like theater sets. I am beginning to know a little, Dear Madeleine, the pleasures you want: it is not to the army* that you will owe them, it is to your virtue ( I understand it in the sense of Robespierre, rest assured …). Renaud Camus. *Read the year , not the army ! (But after all I don’t know anything about it!)”