Claudel paul

1925 · 87317 — Château de Lutaines Cellettes 1925. Fine. And how much this emotion is heightened when the author of this book is our friend when we have conversed familiarly with him and when he is close to us by what has been attributed to him as transient and temporal and close to God by what in him henceforth as eternal has begun! Château de Lutaines Cellettes juin 1925 21 x 27 cm 17 pages sur 5 doubles feuillets Original autograph signed and dated manuscript by Paul Claudel for his preface to Jacques Rivière's 'A la trace de Dieu'. Seventeen and a half pages in black ink on five double leaves. A few words crossed out and rewritten. Horizontal fold some foxing to the first page pencil notes by a bibliographer on the last blank page. The preface dated June 1925 first appeared in Le Correspondant on September 25 1925 then with Rivière's Carnets published the same year by his wife under the title 'A la trace de Dieu' Gallimard pp. 9-24. Complete manuscript of Paul Claudel's moving preface to the notebooks kept by Jacques Rivière during his captivity in WW1. The writer pays homage to a book which would have become a treatise on Christian Apologetics - had its author not met an untimely death at the age of 39. As early as 1907 Claudel had played an important role in his conversion and religious journey. He kept up a correspondence with the young critic now director of Gallimard's prestigious Nrf until his sudden death in 1924. In the manuscript he introduces Rivière's writings from his three years in the Kœnigsbrück and Hülseberg prison camps after his capture during the Battle of Eton in August 1914. In the form of notes he intended for prisoner reunions it contains a profound reflection on the search for God and the means to encounter Him. Although fo or Jacques Rivière ""God remains a fact"": after a long theological quest and many reversals he had reached the pinnacle of his faith during the war years. The deaths of his friends and writers Alain-Fournier and Péguy piety of his wife Isabelle and feeling of being supported by God during those difficult days all contributed to giving him a living faith which the poet-playwright Claudel celebrates in these beautiful pages. Rivière recognized the presence of a personal God in his life and believed in the value of prayer and self-discipline to which Claudel had urged him from their earliest exchanges. These Carnets are the ultimate proof of Claudel's influence: ""Rivière's end was completely illuminated by the doctrine revealed to him by the great Christian poet"" Paul Beaulieu. Claudel devotes magnificent passages to Rivière's communion on Christmas Day 1913 which publicly marked his return to Catholicism: ""All I can say is that Jacques Rivière's life seems to me to be one of those that cannot be explained solely by itself but by the good or bad teaching it contains because it is the type in which a host of others are realized and informed that it has the value of a parable. It is the best illustration of that Providence whose hand he never ceased to feel upon him that humble gentle Providence always present and always unexpected infinitely patient ingenious and artistic of which he spoke so well. It was this Providence that led this good soul through the pilgrimage of Intelligence from the confusion of adolescence to that Christmas day in 1913 when in an act of deference to the most extravagant theories from Darwin to Freud which presented themselves to them with the character of the latest fashion in which the noble deliberation of judgment had more share than the exigency of feeling he came to kneel at the feet of the holy priest of Clichy"". The preface doubling as a eulogy reflects the dialogue between father and spiritual son. Despite their disagreements Claudel admired Rivière's thinking and his objective vision of the Catholic Church in relation to secular society - without seeing it as the guardian of social conservatism like far-right writers like Maurras or Barrès: ""Among J unknown