Ensemble de huit lettres autographes signées adressées à Denise Rollin

BATAILLE Georges: A collection of eight autograph letters signed to Denise Rollin.

An exceptional set of eight signed manuscript letters from George Bataille to Denise Rollin, his lover from the autumn of 1939 to the autumn of 1943.

“The details of Bataille's literary life in these years are well known, but those of his private life are all the more obscure. And it's hardly the smallest paradox in this, the most revealing of all his works, that it barely comments at all on his private life, and generally the worst of it at that.” (M. Surya, G. Bataille, la mort à l'oeuvre)

When Georges Bataille met Denise Rollin in 1939, he had just lost his previous love, Colette Peignot to tuberculosis; all his friends had abandoned him and war had been declared. Nonetheless, this sentimental and social turbulence did not affect Bataille as much as his turbulent relationship with Denise Rollin – friend to Cocteau, Breton, and Prévert, and the muse of Kisling and Derain - at the time.

Their idyll was to last four years, but we have few details of their emotional life during this period of the Occupation, except what Bataille wants to tell us in Le Coupable [Guilty], inspired in part by this passionate and painful relationship.

In a 1961 interview, Bataille remembered this period: “Le Coupable was the first book that gave me a sort of satisfaction, though a worrisome sort, that I've never had with a book before or since. It's perhaps that book in which I was the most true to myself, that resembles me most…because I wrote it in a sort of quite rapid and continuous explosive state.”
Batailles' letters to Denise during this period essentially contain the kernel of the sentiment that was to explode in Le Coupable, as in all of Bataille's work. By turns formal and immediate, complimentary and reproachful, they contain an incessant ebb and flow of love and pain, ecstasy and disappointment, calm and energy; they are often impossible to date precisely, since they all come from the same ecstatic flagellant motion:

“I don't even have the courage any more to tell you everything I'm going through: in any case, bringing such suffering to a man, for precisely no reason, becomes like a sickness, a delirium. I don't know how I've found a way of hoping despite everything – up till now.”

“What you say in your letter has, for me, the power of deliverance; it's like nudity – everything that is torn between us. Once again – I've never felt so proud of you.”

“I'm ashamed of suffering so much and boring you with my suffering when only you are sick.”

“The only reason I talk to you is so you'll know how much I love you, how much you have become in me as real as the sickness.”

“I'm so far out of my mind in this moment, because I feel a sort of complicity and perfidiousness in everyone in order to hurt me, as if you all devoted yourself to some game, aimed at making me even more hopeless.”

“Now I aspire to one thing only, and that's proving to you that I belong to no one but you, that I am tied to you, that I want you to understand this so much that if I had no way left of telling you, of proving myself to you, but to profane myself, I would profane myself before you.”

“I don't want everything to get stuck…I'd rather take on the suffering all by myself, rather than having a sort of infirm mediocrity for you and me.”

“I'm writing to you like a blind man because…you've made me fall into unbearable darkness.”

“Perhaps I was too happy with you for several months, even though anguish was always just around the corner; at least there was for a time a happiness that was almost defiance.”

The war, in these letters, seems only to be seen and lived through Bataille's amorous tension.

As a trivial disagreement when he's satisfied: “Don't worry – at all. You can't imagine how calm everyone is here…if you were here, you'd surely be as calm as I am…All through the alert, I was having breakfast peacefully with my department head who was passing through Paris (he's at the front)…A little later, Henri Michaux came to see me, who's been a pretty close observer of some things. Naturally, there came such a fusillade as we've never [even] dared imagine existed.” As a pitiful echo of some moments of amorous doubt: “I don't want to add another worry to the ones you already have. I barely dare make you smile by telling you that I've lost weight and my trousers sometimes fall down…I don't suffer too much, except when things take that abominable detour of financial difficulty.” Or sometimes as an obstacle to his relationship: “The siren that you heard at the very moment that we parted announced the end of an alert. At first, I was saddened by such a disarming coincidence but when I realized it was the all clear, I began – on the contrary – to hope. But it's hard to feel all at once so attached to you and not to be able to say anything more to you, to be reduced to this letter.”
Sometimes, though, it's perceived as the very essence of this limitless passion: “Sometimes I think that it's as if there were between you and me something more violent and more terrible because we find ourselves in the middle of such great torment; as if this truest of loves couldn't settle for anything less than the overturning of everything.”

Nonetheless, the letters are always dominated by this passion, which relegates external events, even tragic ones, to the background:
“I let myself drown for hours thinking about all the endless outbursts that separate me from you. And then all at once, opposite you, closer to you than ever, I become completely hard again and stronger than what's drowning us both.”
In 1943, Bataille found a house in Vézelay where the couple moved with Laurence, the daughter of Georges and Sylvia and Jean (alias Bepsy?), Denise's son. It was there that Bataille finished his book Le Coupable at the same time as his love affair, since barely a month after their arrival there a young woman of 23, Diane Kotchoubey, moved in next to them. Before the year was out, Bataille had left Denise Rollin for this new passion.
The house at Vézelay is the subject of the last of our letters and it's worth noting that the apartment Bataille is hesitating over here (“there's nothing to let except what I saw”) may be the one he had reserved for Jacques Lacan and Sylvia Bataille. Those two not, in the end, moving there, it was Diane who moved in – and we're familiar with the consequences. This is, no doubt, some kind of logical conclusion to his affair with Denise Rollin, the incarnation of what Bataille called “chance”: “But chance so ensorcelled by a world turned terrible that it made me tremble,” (Le Coupable).

These letters, previously unknown, were kept by Maurice Blanchot, Bataille's best friend and – from 1944 onwards – Denise Rollin's (a woman with a beauty both “melancholic and taciturn” who was “the incarnation of silence”) new lover.

Crumpled (one is even torn into five pieces), these letters are as much a precious memory of Bataille's amorous passion as they are instructional of a poorly-documented time in his personal life (which we only have access to via the external view of his friends).

But above all, they make up an exceptional literary ensemble in which is revealed, by turns the man, the accursed, the adoring fan and the profaner…everything that – according to Michel Foucauld – made Georges Bataille “one of the most important writers of this century.” Because for Bataille, the suffering of this affair constituted love itself, as he writes in Le Coupable:

“Love has this demanding quality: either its object eludes you or you elude them. If they don't flee from you, you will flee love. Lovers find themselves in the condition of tearing themselves apart. One or the other thirsts for suffering. Desire must, in them, want the impossible. If not, desire will dry up, desire will die.”

- Bibliographic note based on information kindly provided by Marina Galletti: the letter beginning “the siren that you heard,” would have been written on the 26 May 1940 (cf. volume V of Oeuvres complètes de GB [GB's Complete Works], p. 521, where the same episode is recalled). The letter beginning “I beg you. You must not worry,” would have been written on the 3^rd or 4^th June 1940 (Cf. vol. V of the Complete Works, p. 524, where his meeting with Michaux is mentioned).