"Y'en a un charlatant là-haut ! et terrible ! et vous le connaissez !..."

Autograph manuscript signed by Louis-Ferdinand Céline written in blue ballpoint pen on a sheet of white paper numbered 237 in the left corner. Some stains as well as a central fold of no consequence. Some pinholes in the upper margin, evidence of the organization of Céline's manuscripts in "bundles".
"Y'en a un charlatant là-haut ! et terrible ! et vous le connaissez !... donc de dessous, là ! de dessous la table, je regarde le moulin... pas loin... peut-être deux cents mètres... et dans quel air éblouissant !... eh bien je vous dis comme je l'ai vu..." ["There's a charlatan up there! and terrible! and you know him!... so from underneath, there! from under the table, I look at the windmill... not far... maybe two hundred meters... and in what dazzling air!... well I tell you as I saw it..."]
The passage from our sheet conforms to the published version.
Published in 1954, Normance is a direct sequel to Féérie pour une autre fois published two years earlier. The two parts were written during Céline's years of exile and imprisonment in Denmark. Upon his return to France in 1951, Céline undertook a work of "polishing" and published these two titanic texts independently, originally conceived as one. "Céline, while working on it, thought of this novel as a second Voyage au bout de la nuit, capable twenty years later of astonishing the public as much as the 1932 novel." (Henri Godard)