" ...Ne regrettez pas trop de ne pouvoir faire le voyage, en raison, primo de ce temps sans bonne grâce, et secundo de l'état moral plutpot vaseux de votre gendre. Mauvaise période ! ..."

Fine autograph letter dated and signed by Henri Béraud addressed to his mother-in-law while he was incarcerated at Poissy prison (43 lines in blue ink on one recto-verso page) suffering psychologically from his situation as a prisoner.
The letter is on letterhead from the infirmary of the central prison of Poissy, with fold marks inherent to being placed in an envelope.
Morally affected, the prisoner Henri Béraud attempts to show optimism by putting his misfortunes in perspective: "... Mauvaise période ! Mais après la pluie le beau temps. Celui qui a trouvé cela est un consolateur qui en vaut bien d'autre, et qui, somme toute, n'est pas le plus bête..." ["Bad times! But after the rain comes fair weather. Whoever found that saying is a comforter as good as any other, and who, all in all, is not the most foolish..."]
He asks his wife Germaine to send him: " ... Si elle en a la possibilité, elle peut forcer sur le pain d'épices, qui vraiment est d'un grand secours..." ["If she has the possibility, she can increase the gingerbread, which truly is of great help..."] and rejoices ironically about his condition : "... Pour le reste, madame la marquise, tout va très bien, trop bien ! " ["For the rest, madame la marquise, everything is going very well, too well!"]
Finally, Henri Béraud impatiently awaits a new photograph of his wife: "... pour cela, je suis insatiable. Et ma cellule, pourtant, en est illuminée dejà ! ..." ["for that, I am insatiable. And my cell, however, is already illuminated by it!..."]
A bon vivant native of Lyon, Henri Béraud was a journalist and international reporter (Le canard enchaîné, Le Crapouillot, Petit Parisien, France-Soir and Gringoire) and a prolific writer (Prix Goncourt 1922 for Le martyre de l'obèse and Le vitriol de lune published a year earlier) whose political evolution, moving from the extreme left to the extreme right pro-collaborationist position, is characteristic of the inexorable rise of totalitarianism in the inter-war period and the corruption of many French intellectuals. Friend of Roland Dorgelès, Albert Londres and especially Joseph Kessel whom he met in 1922 in Ireland when it was recently and partially liberated from British rule, Henri Béraud defended very left-wing opinions. But after a trip to the U.S.S.R., he began to revise his positions while drifting toward anti-parliamentarism, Anglophobia (Faut-il réduire l'Angleterre en esclavage ? published in 1935 and dedicated to Joseph Kessel), and anti-Semitism "without realizing it" according to his friend the journalist Jean-Galtier Boissière. It was the Stavisky affair and its corollary, the riots of the fascist and anti-parliamentarian leagues of February 6, 1934, that triggered Henri Béraud's manifest passage to the extreme right, going so far as to break his friendship with his great friend Joseph Kessel. In 1936, his violent articles in Gringoire led to the suicide of the Popular Front's Interior Minister Roger Salengro, accused of desertion during the First World War. Arrested in September 1944 and sentenced to death on December 29, 1944 for intelligence with the enemy, he was pardoned by General De Gaulle.