Renaud CAMUS – Autograph letter signed to Madeleine Chapsal.

Renaud CAMUS (1946-)

Autograph letter signed to Madeleine Chapsal.

Four pages, large quarto. Folded. January 25, 2006

“Dear Commander (or Commander?), will you forgive me for taking so long to read your book and for only thanking you now? I didn’t want to write to you about it without having read it with all the attention it doubly deserves, because it comes from you and because one is necessarily, alas, captivated by its subject. But the first reason outweighs the second, so I withdraw ‘alas,’ and growing old between your sentences is, if not entirely a pleasure—no exaggeration—at least an experience of wisdom, and sweet as such. I 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, for once, to choose only one of your reflections, which I find wonderfully accurate and profound. It is the one you make about letters—and especially love letters, I presume, but not only, which one only truly understands twenty, thirty, or fifty (years) later.” I had experienced it a thousand times, but without realizing it. Time is the great interpreter. How clear everything is with it! So clear, and so profound… It is one of the great pleasures of age, as you so wonderfully point out, this relief it places between sentences, beginning, of course, with those of our lives. Everything begins to resemble those photographs on glass plates, do you remember them, that we looked at in special cameras and that carved space into successive, well-defined planes, like theatrical scenery. I am beginning to understand a little, dear Madeleine, the pleasures I should wish for you: it is not to the army* that you will owe them, but to your virtue ( I mean it in the Robespierrean sense, rest assured …). Renaud Camus. *Read the year , not the army ! (But after all, I don't know!)