According to our information, the investigations did not make it possible to establish how thousands of unpublished novelty sheets, disappeared to the release, were able to reappear in 2020.
by Jérôme Dupuis
It will be said that nothing is ever simple with Louis-Ferdinand Céline. We could have imagined that the miraculous rediscovery of thousands of handwritten pages of the travel author at the end of the night missing in 1944, revealed by Le Monde in August 2021, would remain a strictly literary event; Especially since among these leaflets are hiding two new novels – war and London – as well as the complete manuscript of the mythical blowjob, which the “Célinians” dreamed of reading for seventy-five years.
The reappearance of these “treasures” was nevertheless lined up with a courts. In February, the two successful rights of the dead writer in 1961, François Gibault and Véronique Chovin, had filed a complaint for “Flight Rely” against Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, the man who had secretly preserved these manuscripts for years before years. to restore them. It is, indeed, of public notoriety – Céline ragefully recalled in his post-war works – that these documents had been stolen in his apartment in Montmartre, at the time of liberation. For months, the men of the Central Office for the Fight Against Trafficking in Cultural Property (CBOs) investigated this three-quart century flight. According to our information, on September 21, the Paris Prosecutor finally decided to first classify this investigation. Reason: “Insufficiently characterized offense”.
A mysterious donor
To understand the issue of this procedure, we must go back to June 1944. On the Butte Montmartre, Louis-Ferdinand Celine feels that the wind turns. Of novelist celebrated pre-war for journey at the end of the night (1932) and death on credit (1936), it has become the author of terrible anti-Semitic Pamphlets – Bagatelles for a massacre, the Ecole des Cadavres – and the friend of the Nazis. The casting allied will precipitate his flight to Germany. He just has time to gather his gold and catch his Cat Bébert and, on June 17, file, with his wife Lucette, to Baden-Baden. In the precipitation, it is forced to leave, asked at the top of a cabinet of its apartment of Rue Girardon, a brewed with manuscripts. There is a break-blowjob, dead on credit, the will of King Kogold and thousands of other pages.
The writer will never see these manuscripts again. In the chaos of liberation, they disappear mysteriously. Despite the fierce research of many Celineans, one will lose their track until 2020. On June 11 which year, indeed, through a lawyer, M e Emmanuel Pierrat, A man makes contact with the two successful Lucette Destouches, the widow of the writer, disappeared in November 2019 at the age of 107 years. This man is called Jean-Pierre Thibaudat. Dramatic journalist and criticism, including liberation, he reveals that he holds the 5,324 slips disappeared in 1944. For many years, he has filed and especially decrypted these thousands of pages without blowing a word to anyone. It dreams of seeing them joined the Institute of Contemporary Publishing, an archive fund installed in Normandy.
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