Portrait photographique de Fernand Destouches, père de Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Rare period photograph of Fernand Destouches (1865-1932), father of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, carte-de-visite format albumen print mounted on card from studio A. Émile.
Two small adhesive marks to lower margin of the print, also showing two tiny lacks to upper corners. Manuscript caption on verso.

One of the principal protagonists of Death on the Installment Plan, the petit-bourgeois Fernand Destouches from Le Havre is transformed by his son into a formidable belching and irascible character:
« Mon père Auguste, il tripotait, sacrait, jurait, déglinguait chaque fois la douille et le manchon. C'était un gros blond, mon père, furieux pour des riens, avec un nez comme un bébé tout rond, au-dessus de moustaches énormes. Il roulait des yeux féroces quand la colère lui montait. Il se souvenait que des contrariétés. Il en avait eu des centaines. Au bureau des Assurances, il gagnait cent dix francs par mois. » ["My father Auguste, he fiddled, swore, cursed, broke the socket and sleeve every time. He was a big blond, my father, furious over nothing, with a nose like a baby's all round, above enormous mustaches. He rolled fierce eyes when anger rose in him. He only remembered annoyances. He'd had hundreds of them. At the Insurance office, he earned a hundred and ten francs a month."] (Death on the Installment Plan, Denoël & Steele, 1936)
Throughout his life Céline maintained an atmosphere of fictional romance around his father's life and claimed that he held a baccalaureate and a degree in letters. The family's financial failures as well as his father's aborted ambitions, amplified by Céline into sordid proletarian dramas, served as the cornerstone for Death on the Installment Plan, which he forbade his mother to read.

Of utmost rarity.