Manuscrit original sur "L'Atelier d'un peintre", "qui fait grincer les dents existentialistes"

Autograph manuscript by Louis Aragon, one page in blue ink on a leaf.

Precious study by Louis Aragon accompanying the serial publication in Les Lettres Françaises of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's novel L'Atelier d'un peintre (1833). Aragon rehabilitates the female poet-novelist canceled from the history of literature and snubbed by Existentialists, placing her in the tradition of socialist realism.

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Autograph manuscript by Louis Aragon, one page in blue ink on one leaf. Numerous crossed out words and rewritings. Slight rusting due to a paper clip, slight shadows of an ink transfer from another page. Published in Les Lettres Françaises, episode 16, 23 February 1950.
In 1949, Aragon chose to publish 'L'Atelier d'un peintre' serially with his own comments. The Cold War made socialist realism the official literary genre for Communist cultural policy: 'For Aragon, reading Marceline Desbordes-Valmore is above all reading the history of a generation, of a people. More precisely, he made Marceline an incarnation of the unfinished Republic, of a world still under construction, and one that was tending towards freedom. To understand Marceline, Aragon invites us to 'date her writings', and not be content to confine her to a single period of her life, but to try to find an explanation for her stances, which were as different as the regimes during the gestation of the Republic in the nineteenth century'. (Aghbarian, Lina, 'Aragon éditeur de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore', Recherches croisées Aragon - Elsa Triolet, no. 14).
Of all his comments accompanying 'L'Atelier d'un peintre', this is one of his most polemical: Aragon opposes the Surrealists by contesting Lautréamont's distate of the Romantics with whom Desbordes-Valmore was associated. The writer criticizes the hasty rejection of her work, which nevertheless has counterparts in modern literature: 'The Atelier that Aragon reopens with the publication of this novel, to rework it, to reveal it, to give it a second life closer to his own concerns, after having disentangled it from its time, and emptied it of its Romantic religiosity, to lay bare its richness, which lies in the feminist cause defended by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore [. ...] For her, Ondine, the literary character, was a transposition of the missing child, her son, the son of Henri de Latouche, her lover. Ondine is thus three times hybrid, androgynous, real and imaginary, daughter and mother at the same time, and Léonard, her inverted double, the one she would have liked to be in order to succeed in the forbidden world of painting. Aragon doubles androgyny with homosexuality, as seen in Yorick's phrase 'Talma doubles my existence'. Among other allusions, he refers to Henri Miller's Sexus [an allusion is made about this work in this manuscript] Aragon cultivates the theme of duality on which the whole novel is built. Without abandoning the imaginary world of the novel, he seeks to bring out the realistic side of this romantic novel, hidden in the shadow of the lyrical novel. In a word, Aragon reverses the order of the foreground and background: the romanticism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's novel becomes secondary, and the historical background takes precedence' (ibid.).


'We have now come to the night scene in the Place Vendôme, which is one of the most intense, the most beautiful minutes of the novel of the other century... I know that not everyone will agree. It's come to my attention that there are people who are superbly distracted from L'Atelier d'un peintre, and find it wrong that we should publish a story in which there is absolutely nothing of what THEY are looking for in novels, and it's possible that those who can't read only see a bluette, literature for young girls. Even if it is, it's as good as literature for old men!
But, finally, it has to be said, we are publishing here this masterpiece, deliberately ignored by those who write literary history, and which makes existentialist teeth grind, or simply spoilt teeth, as an example, sure that it will not be in vain.
Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, whose authority today's fashionable people would not dare challenge, condemned nearly eighty years ago those he called 'the Great Softheads' of Romanticism, those who wrote badly. But to this day, all literature written for the good is judged with contempt by this Medusa, the so-called elite, made up of very small soft heads. The revision of values announced by Ducasse has begun, whether he likes it or not. And right here.
The scene in Place Vendôme - for those of you who are just reading, not thinking whether it holds up next to Henry Miller's Sexus -, to better imagine it, what if we gave you a new image of Yorick Angelmann, its protagonist? What do you say to this portrait of a stranger [illustration chosen for this article], by Géricault, and which for similar reasons no doubt has been claimed to be this portrait of Lord Byron? which is very far from being proved.'