About a book: Le Prince des Cravates by Lucien Daudet
Here is a very moving example of the
mysterious transmission of a great literary power through the
"blood line" in which M. Lucien Daudet has given us one
after the other Le Chemin mort, La Foumilière,
Le Prince des Cravates, which all take their place
beside those other masterpieces such as L'Evangéliste
or Les Journées de Femme, such as Le Voyage de
Shakespeare or Le Partage de l'Enfant. Yet they are
entirely different from those, for they are entirely original.
No less because M. Lucien Daudet did not, it
seems, possess the fixity of purpose, the premeditation to carry
on, through his writing, those works amongst which he had grown
up. To begin with he appeared to have led a double existence,
that of a Paul de Manerville or a Beaudenord, of Balzac's young
and elegant, and at the same time that of a painter. But the
delicate, settled and sensible understanding of the life around
which Mme Alphonse Daudet embroidered her delightful fantasies
from which she has shown us in one precious page as in a page of Economiques,
the thread taken back to Mme Gréty by Mme Valmore and to the
latter by Mme Allard did not cease to redress in him what is
artificial and disastrous in the "Bohemian world" of
studios, whereas the profound human pity that preserves the
wonderful charm of a Jack or a young Fromont, continually
denounced to him what is harsh, conventional, Pharisian in a life
which is purely worldly.
During this time the practice, given to the
rarest talents, of painting in Whistler's studio, trained his eye
to discern true colour, subtlety and freshness in the most
ordinary spectacles, whereas, it seems, a superabundant taste in
the landed gentry upon seeing a little cultivation, brought a new
element to this complex soul.
And then, one fine day, all these elements
reveal a secret affinity one for the other, combining together to
create a unique composition: the writer is born. At every turn in
this new volume you will find the eternal and renewed accent of
human compassion with its constituent irony with regard to
fashionable philanthropy, above all in the short story called Brisacier,
a masterpiece which the author has boldly been able to dedicate
to Balzac's daughter-in-law, who will be able to see in it a
quality of observation, of emotion that we have rarely had the
chance to admire since Le Cousin Pons. A thousand
exquisitely accurate notations of subtle nuances, like the Ruban
rose of that road from Saint-Pierre-Eglise at Carentan that
I like to compare to George de Lauris's Norman roads in his
beautiful and profound Ginette Chatenay which has
reverberated so strongly in the hearts of the select few and
which is already revealed in all the great value of his delicious
talent as psychologist and writer (from the same series of
"harmonies", as described by Whistler, where the pink
of the stained-glass window of the Impressions de Bretagne,
the pink of a beach, the pinks of Easter, woods viewed across the
"good graces" of a castle window, in La Foumilière,
are the contribution of the painter in M. Daudet and which is
triumphant in a short story which is titled with a simple
question mark, utterly worthy of the wonderful poet to whom it is
dedicated. Mme Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, like Mnahie [sic], is worthy
of her sponsor, the great novelist Léon Daudet, author of that
unique book L'Astre noir.
Nothing is more interesting than the short
story entitled: "?", told with the concision of a
Merimée who would have been a poet. The enigmatic figure of the
priest who has a Whistler in his house, and who is himself a
Whistler, the figure of abbé Reure has now become a magnificent
addition to the unforgettable ecclesiastical figures in La
Foumilière. And always the inheritance of a spell makes
itself felt, the flash of some bequeathed talisman, of paternal
forces. Whenever we become entangled in explanations, in endless
comparisons, M. Lucien Daudet, with his youthful mastery, prunes
away the superfluous, is only satisfied with what is unique and
necessary in connection with the image, tells us of the Greek
gods who only remain now "as a profile in white stone"
or of the "sunny mauve brightness of wisteria" (so
beautifully characterized in another short story).
Those two last examples are taken from the
first short story, Le Prince des Cravates, even still a
"frivolous Prince", as has been said by Jean Cocteau, a
twenty year old Banville for whom a higher destiny awaits, the
story which gives its title to the whole volume and (since it
gives me so much pleasure to see the different personalities
which compose the personality of M. Lucien Daudet excel in each
one), in which I willingly recognize what I just called in him a
Felix Vandenesse or a Paul de Mannerville. Nothing could be less
imitative of Balzac, more drawn from contemporary life and the
personal talent of the author than this story. But nothing, on
the other hand, is so much the equivalent of certain of Balzac's
short stories. And if we have recognized in the unhappy Brisacier
the authentic cousin of Parents pauvres, it is the
apparent frivolity, the profound humanity of a story like Le
Contrat de Mariage that makes us think of Le Prince des
Cravates.
Article appeared in L'Intransigeant, 21 September 1910.