"on passe des bachots à tout âge !"

Partly unpublished autograph letter signed by "your touchy LF" Louis-Ferdinand Céline addressed to his lawyer, Maître Thorvald Mikkelsen. One page written in blue ink on a large sheet of white paper; number "563" in Céline's hand in the upper left corner in red pencil.
Transverse folds inherent to the mailing.
This letter was very partially transcribed in the Année Céline 2005.
Céline, after days of suffering from the cold, is delighted to announce to his friend that he has received heating: "Le fourneau se pose en ce moment. Je ne sais pas si la maison y résistera l'on verra !" ["The stove is being installed right now. I don't know if the house will withstand it, we shall see!"] This letter also mentions his Swedish friend Ernst Bendz, like him a doctor and writer: "Benz (sic) vous cherche un La Bruyère en suédois - on passe des bachots à tout âge !" ["Bendz is looking for a La Bruyère in Swedish for you - one takes exams at any age!"]
In 1947, Céline, pursued by French justice for his collaborationist involvement, was confined in Denmark. It was in May 1948, accompanied by Lucette and Bébert, that he arrived at his lawyer Maître Thorvald Mikkelsen's home in Klarskovgaard. The latter owned a large property by the Baltic Sea and invited the exile to stay there. On February 21, 1950, as part of the purge, the writer was definitively condemned in absentia by the civic chamber of the Paris Court of Justice for collaboration to one year of imprisonment (which he had already served in Denmark). The Swedish Consul General in Paris, Raoul Nordling, intervened on his behalf with Gustav Rasmussen, the Danish Foreign Minister, and managed to delay his extradition. On April 20, 1951, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, his lawyer since 1948, obtained Céline's amnesty as a "severely disabled veteran of the Great War" by presenting his file under the name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches without any magistrate making the connection. Céline would leave Denmark the following summer, after three years spent at his lawyer's home.