"Je viens de perdre à l'hospice d'Angers encore une dernière parente"

Autograph letter signed, partly unpublished, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, addressed to his lawyer, Maître Thorvald Mikkelsen. Two pages written in blue ink on a large sheet of white paper; numbered “575” in Céline’s hand in red pencil at the top left corner.
Fold marks from mailing.
This letter was only partially transcribed in Année Céline 2005, p. 64.
 
A moving and bitter letter by Céline, who had just lost his aunt Amélie (the “Aunt Hélène” of Death on Credit), and witnesses the slow disappearance of the world he once knew. The writer finds solace in the memoirs of Élisabeth de Gramont, another witness to a bygone era.

From his Danish exile, Céline learns with sorrow of the death of his Aunt Amélie, the last surviving member of the Destouches family: “Je viens de perdre à l'hospice d'Angers encore une dernière parente.” Although he had not spared his alter ego in Death on Credit—the scandalous Aunt Hélène meets a shameful end, trailed by suitors, lovers or clients—he recalls: “À Saint-Pétersbourg, elle est devenue grue. [...] Elle est venue nous voir au Passage, deux fois de suite, frusquée, superbe, comme une princesse et heureuse et tout. Elle a terminé très tragiquement sous les balles d’un officier.”
The real Aunt Amélie had settled in Romania, married to a diplomat, Zenon Zawirski. Unfortunately, reality caught up with fiction: she returned to Paris in utter destitution at the age of 80. Céline arranged for her transfer from the hospice of the Little Sisters of the Poor in Breteuil to the hospital in Angers, where she died in December 1950 (“Que la pauvre femme meure gentiment. Assez de fins tragiques dans la famille !” he had written to Dr. Camus on 11 July 1949). His secretary, Marie Canavaggia, met her before her arrival in Angers: “elle avait par moments des gestes et des expressions qui en éclairs me rappelaient son neveu” (13 July 1949).
 
With the last of his family gone, Céline reflects on his own end: “si ça continue si je rentre jamais en France je foncerai directement au cimetière.” Devouring the books his lawyer sent to ease the burden of exile, Céline describes his current readings: “Le Temps des équipages [by Élisabeth de Gramont] est un des livres fameux parus vers 1920 ! L’un des « Guides des Snobs » les mieux réussis de l’Époque.” It is striking to imagine Céline delighting in this aristocrat’s social chronicle, so alien to his world: “J’avais un ami, Carré, de Rennes, étudiant en droit, qui l’avait appris par cœur ! [...] il s’en est établi marchand de tableaux.”
As a young medical student, Céline had indeed crossed paths with Louis Carré, later a successful Parisian art dealer who exhibited Paul Klee, Juan Gris, Le Corbusier and Picasso: “il y a fait 10 fois fortune ! Preuve que tous les livres ne sont pas déprimants !”
 
In 1947, pursued by French justice for his collaborationist stance, Céline took refuge in Denmark. In May 1948, accompanied by Lucette and Bébert, he arrived at the home of his lawyer Maître Thorvald Mikkelsen in Klarskovgaard. Mikkelsen owned a large estate on the Baltic Sea and welcomed the exiled writer to stay. On 21 February 1950, as part of the post-war purge, Céline was definitively sentenced in absentia by the Civic Chamber of the Paris Court of Justice to one year in prison for collaboration (a sentence already served in Denmark). Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul general in Paris, intervened on his behalf with Gustav Rasmussen, the Danish Foreign Minister, successfully delaying his extradition. On 20 April 1951, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, his lawyer since 1948, obtained Céline’s amnesty as a “severely disabled veteran of the Great War,” submitting the case under the name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, without the magistrates making the connection. Céline left Denmark that summer, after three years spent in his lawyer’s home.