The Journal of Jules Renard pdf Jules Renard Free Download

“Je lis avec ravissement le Journal de Jules Renard . . . Il y a là, par moments, de l’excellent, du parfait; et parfois même, ô surprise, de l’attendri . . .”

—André Gide, Journal (March 1927)

It is difficult to discover, given Jules Renard’s steadily augmented reputation in France and elsewhere since his death in 1910, the reasons for the almost total neglect of his work in England and America. His chief fame in English-speaking countries came to be attached to the motion picture, released in the early thirties, based on Poil de Carotte, the extraordinary autobiographical récit first published in 1894 and later made into a one-act play by Renard in 1900. In France, his early novel, L’Ecornifleur (1892), is considered one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. His Journal, published in definitive form in 1935, was reissued in 1960 in the format of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade—a series remarkable for its finely-produced editions of French classical literature. Critical praise of a high order has been tendered the author over the years. Albert Thibaudet in 1927 named Renard’s Journal inédit, along with Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt, as incontestably the two autobiographical masterpieces of the twentieth century.

Renard never in any manner attached himself to that avant-garde which was in process of formation in Paris in all the arts during his lifetime, and this separation from movements which were about to gather to themselves the most striking talents of the new century may well have kept his reputation apart from the mainstream of influence. Renard wrote plays for the theatres of the boulevards. He became a member of the Académie Goncourt, but was never closely in touch with the experimental or the extreme. Although he knew and liked Toulouse-Lautrec (who was to illustrate his Histoires naturelles ), he took no interest when Maurice Ravel set parts of this most charming bestiary to music, not even to the extent of attending a first concert presentation.

It is one of Renard’s central virtues that his mind and emotions continued to be refreshed by the air of his countryside—especially during the years—when he, like his father before him, became mayor of Chitry.

The keeping of a journal may become a futile and time-wasting occupation for a writer. Temptations toward the inconsequential detail, the vaporous idea and the self-regarding emotion are always present and can become overwhelming. Renard’s Journal, from its beginning, shows a young writer who is consciously moving away from early mistakes, whose goal is cleanness of style and precision of language. We do not see him as an innovator, but as one who made restitution of certain classically severe effects which the French Romantics in their exuberance, and the Symbolists in their search for the extremes of musicality, had overlooked or ignored. It is possible, in the pages of the Journal, to watch Renard training himself, “independent of schools . . . how to reproduce in compressed and resistant [prose] life completely pure and completely simple”—his life and the life of others.

The atmosphere of the period was hardly propitious for this sort of truth-telling, or this sort of style. The great days of Symbolism were over—Mallarmé had died in 1898—and the central figures of the modem revolt in all the arts were still too young to have made their mark. A tired exoticism afflicted academic and “official” art, and poetry (no matter how feeble)—not prose—gave entrance to the salons. Renard’s early apprenticeship writing reflects this atmosphere. But by 1890, when he was twenty-six, he had begun to put his youthful affectations and artificialities behind him for good; the Journal, from its first pages, abounds in mockery of the false, the half-observed, and the grandiose.

Renard’s passion for factual truth and stylistic exactitude, once formed, remained central to his work throughout his career. This preoccupation never hardened into obsession; one of the great pleasures of reading Renard is the certainty, soon felt by the reader, that nothing is being put down in meanness or malice. The shadow of the small boy who had suffered bitterly because of the obsessions of his parents—his father’s mutism, his mother’s hypocrisy—always falls across the page. But Renard, in speaking difficult and shocking truths concerning Mme. Lepic (the name given to the mother of Poil de Carotte was carried over, in the Journal, to denote his own mother), does not hesitate to tell equally shocking truths about her red-headed son. Hard facts concerning family relationships were not usual in end-of-the-century writing.

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