Original autograph signed and dated manuscript by Paul Claudel, for his preface to Jacques Rivière's 'A la trace de Dieu'. Seventeen and a half pages in black ink on five double leaves.
A few words crossed out and rewritten. Horizontal fold, some foxing to the first page, pencil notes by a bibliographer on the last blank page. The preface, dated June 1925, first appeared in Le Correspondant on September 25, 1925, then with Rivière's Carnets published the same year by his wife under the title 'A la trace de Dieu' (Gallimard, pp. 9-24).
Complete manuscript of Paul Claudel's moving preface to the notebooks kept by Jacques Rivière during his captivity in WW1. The writer pays homage to a book which would have become a treatise on Christian Apologetics - had its author not met an untimely death at the age of 39.
As early as 1907, Claudel had played an important role in his conversion and religious journey. He kept up a correspondence with the young critic, now director of Gallimard's prestigious Nrf, until his sudden death in 1924. In the manuscript, he introduces Rivière's writings from his three years in the Kœnigsbrück and Hülseberg prison camps, after his capture during the Battle of Eton in August 1914. In the form of notes he intended for prisoner reunions, it contains a profound reflection on the search for God and the means to encounter Him. Although fo or Jacques Rivière, "God remains a fact": after a long theological quest and many reversals, he had reached the pinnacle of his faith during the war years. The deaths of his friends and writers Alain-Fournier and Péguy, piety of his wife Isabelle and feeling of being supported by God during those difficult days, all contributed to giving him a living faith which the poet-playwright Claudel celebrates in these beautiful pages. Rivière recognized the presence of a personal God in his life, and believed in the value of prayer and self-discipline, to which Claudel had urged him from their earliest exchanges. These Carnets are the ultimate proof of Claudel's influence: "Rivière's end was completely illuminated by the doctrine revealed to him by the great Christian poet" (Paul Beaulieu). Claudel devotes magnificent passages to Rivière's communion on Christmas Day 1913, which publicly marked his return to Catholicism: "All I can say is that Jacques Rivière's life seems to me to be one of those that cannot be explained solely by itself, but by the good or bad teaching it contains, because it is the type in which a host of others are realized and informed, that it has the value of a parable. It is the best illustration of that Providence whose hand he never ceased to feel upon him, that humble, gentle Providence, always present and always unexpected, infinitely patient, ingenious and artistic, of which he spoke so well. It was this Providence that led this good soul through the pilgrimage of Intelligence from the confusion of adolescence to that Christmas day in 1913, when, in an act of deference to the most extravagant theories, from Darwin to Freud, which presented themselves to them with the character of the latest fashion in which the noble deliberation of judgment had more share than the exigency of feeling, he came to kneel at the feet of the holy priest of Clichy".
The preface doubling as a eulogy reflects the dialogue between father and spiritual son. Despite their disagreements, Claudel admired Rivière's thinking and his objective vision of the Catholic Church in relation to secular society - without seeing it as the guardian of social conservatism, like far-right writers like Maurras or Barrès: "Among Jacques Rivière's models, the one that has been studied the furthest, and which stands out the best as a whole, is the study he has entitled: Le Catholicisme et la Société (Catholicism and Society). He develops ideas that will seem subversive to many, but which it was more necessary today than ever to set out. To oppose, we might say, rather than to posit, not as the absolute truth, but as the necessary antithesis of a thesis no less deficient in itself, which we see with regret taking on the value of an indisputable principle and fact among certain publicists. What platitudes, what nauseating tirades have we had to absorb on the social value of Christianity, on the help it brings to the established order and to sacrosanct "tradition", on the appeasement it provides to employers and landlords, on its natural alliance with the Constituted Authorities! How unbelievably condescending it is to be allowed to take its place alongside Auguste Comte among the Caryatids who are called upon to support the throne of the Goddess Nation! For some spirits, social order is not an ill-cut slope, a precarious and mediocre compromise whose injustices are all too visible, but one that is practically justified insofar as it serves God all the same, by the peace as it is that it brings to the greatest number, and by the humble facilities it provides for the all-important matter of salvation: Conservation, the good of he who has, is for them the first principle, a thing so sure and so beautiful that it is from it that Religion borrows most of its virtue and truth. "
Claudel joins Rivière on the question of Divine Providence, finding signs in every aspect of his life: "Man is free in the midst of a world that is not. He has to coordinate his own movement with a multitude of movements that do not depend on him. He has under his feet, amidst a multitude of companions, a moving floor. He collaborates with a Providence which, in the manner of a slope, drives events, which regulates the direction and rhythm of their progress, but which does not dispense with his intervention as a Volunteer for the realization of his designs, and which deals with him through a delicate system of refusals and provocations." The seventeen pages of this preface celebrate Rivière's pioneering spirit in his relationship with religion - Claudel even portraying him as a hero from a Jules Verne adventure novel:
"There is probably not one of my readers who does not know that admirable novel by Jules Verne, L'Ile mystérieuse. Castaways are thrown onto an unknown island, where they believe they are alone and abandoned to their own resources. Then, at critical moments, help arrives from who knows where. A fire is lit, a crate full of tools washes ashore, a rope is thrown from a rock, enemies are exterminated. None of these events can be explained in a more or less natural way, and the coarsest minds in the company are content to benefit from this occult collaboration without bothering to look for the author. But not the engineer Cyrus Smith. We see him in a moving engraving, suspended, lantern in hand, at the end of a rope ladder at the bottom of a well, surveying this black water from which at certain moments seemed to him to emanate suspicious noises and movements. (In fact, this is where every evening Captain Nemo, emerging from his underwater hermitage, comes to indulge in the human voice). Then things go wrong, and the lamentable moment arrives, dreaded by all readers of novels, of the explanation, which is always so inferior to our expectations. Rivière's attitude is analogous to that of Cyrus Smith"
Four months after Rivière's death, Claudel writes here a magnificent ode to his spiritual and literary encounter with Rivière, a "spirit on the march towards truth".
