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Georges BATAILLE

Lettre autographe signée à Denise Rollin : « Comme si l'amour le plus vrai ne pouvait s'accorder qu'avec le dérangement de tout. »

s.l. s.d. [circa 1940-1943], 20,9x27 cm, 1 page.

Autograph signed letter to Denise Rollin: “As if the truest love could
only be matched with the inconvenience of everything”
 

Autograph letter signed by Georges Bataille to Denise Rollin, 18 lines in black ink.
Letter of a passionate love during the war. Georges Bataille is in Paris where the German offensive is in full swing: “[...] the German attack begins again.”
 
But this destruction does not reach Bataille's loving exaltation, on the contrary: “Sometimes I think that it is as if there was something more violent and terrible between you and me because we found ourselves in the middle of such a great turmoil. As if the truest
love could only be matched with the inconvenience of everything.”
The writing has an almost magical quality of incarnation: “By writing this to you, it is as if everything opened up between you to me and in such a way that whatever is alive there could laugh at everything.” Coupled with imagination and the strength of feelings, it is possible to overcome absence: “[...] suddenly you are there beside me, it is as if the distance was powerless to separate us.” Bataille tries to reassure his correspondent: “But under no circumstances must you worry about me. I will meet you again tonight at nine o'clock.” He ends his letter by asking her:  “Give little Laurence a big kiss and tell her that I will write to her tomorrow.” Laurence is the daughter that Georges Bataille had with Sylvia Bataille, his first wife. At the time of this letter, she was in Vézelay with Denise Rollin, in this blended family that also includes Jean, the son that Denise had with her husband. Evidence, if needed, of the author's claims of the Bataille-Rollin couple's sexual and moral freedom, which was still rare at the time.


Although Bataille's life as a writer is well known in these years, little is known about his private life. And it is not the least paradox of his very revealing work that it only tells the minimum of his private affairs, and usually the worst of it.” (M. Surya, G. Bataille, la mort à l'œuvre). When Georges Bataille met Denise Rollin in 1939, he had just lost his lover Colette Peignot to tuberculosis. His friends had abandoned him and war had just been declared. This sentimental and social chaos however, does not affect Bataille as much as the tumultuous relationship he took up with Denise Rollin who was a friend of Cocteau, Breton, Prévert and a muse of painters Kisling and Derain. Their romance lasted four years and left very few details of their sentimental life during this period of Occupation, except what Bataille is willing to tell us in his novel Le Coupable (The Guilty) partly inspired by this passionate and painful relationship.

In a 1961 interview, Bataille looked back on this time: "Le Coupable is the first book that gave me a kind of satisfaction, an anxious one at that, that no book had given me and that no book has given me since. It is perhaps the book in which I am the most myself, which resembles me the most... because I wrote it as if in a sort of quick and continuous explosion." The letters addressed by Bataille to Denise during this period contain the seeds of the feelings that explode in Le Coupable as in all of Bataille's work. His writing is an ebb and flow of love and suffering, between ecstasy and disappointment, calm and energy, mixing familiar and formal tones, compliments and reproaches. The letters are often impossible to date with precision as they all proceed from the same movement of ecstatic flagellation.


In 1943, Georges Bataille found a house in Vézelay where the couple settled with Laurence (Georges and Sylvia's daughter), and Denise's son Jean. It was there that Bataille completed his book Le Coupable as well as his love story since barely a month after their arrival, Diane Kotchoubey, a young woman of 23, moved in with them. Before the end of the year, Bataille left Denise Rollin for this new flame.


These previously unknown letters were kept by Bataille's best friend Maurice Blanchot who from 1944 became the new lover Denise Rollin, this woman with a "melancholic and taciturn" beauty who "embodied silence". The crumpled letters (one is even torn into five pieces) are as much the precious trace of Bataille's extraordinary passion as they are a valuable source from a little-known period of his intimate life which was until then only perceived through the eyes of his friends. Above all they are of an exceptional literary quality and reveal several sides to him: the man, the accursed, the worshipper and the profaner... all that, according to Michel Foucault, makes Georges Bataille "one of the most important writers of this century”.