Ce qu'ils disent ou rien

First edition, for which no large-paper copies were printed; one of the review copies.

A pleasing copy.

Laconic but significant autograph inscription, dated and signed by Annie Ernaux, to Gallimard's esteemed reader, the writer Christiane Baroche: « merci. »

Published three years after Les Armoires vides, Ce qu'ils disent ou rien already announces the major themes of the work to come: class shame, social determinism, and the difficulty of being a woman. The novel met with a respectful critical reception, still far from the recognition that would later come to the author with La Place (Prix Renaudot, 1984) and then the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022.

Likewise, the writer Christiane Baroche had not yet, in the year of this inscription, received the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle. It is in her capacity as Gallimard's highly valued manuscript reader that she is thanked here with a brief but meaningful inscription. There is no doubt that this second novel by the young suburban schoolteacher owed to its dedicatee the favourable opinion that confirmed her status as a writer, some years before La femme gelée and La Place.

Ernaux would later give Baroche a copy of La Place enriched with an explicit dedication: "Pour Christiane, qui m'a fait "naître" dans le bonheur il y a dix ans. Annie. 3/02/84."

The two women of letters, then at the outset of their careers, would go on to maintain a relationship of friendship and mutual admiration, as attested by their correspondence and by Christiane Baroche's laudatory articles. It was only from L'Occupation onward that Baroche, then a journalist for the Magazine Littéraire, became more critical and severe toward her fellow writer's works, though we cannot say whether their friendship was profoundly affected by it.