And Renard, in the Journal , presents the erotic elements in the son-mother relationship with extraordinary frankness—a frankness he shares with Stendhal (in Henri Brulard) before him, and with the Proust who is to come.

Truth about life, in Renard’s view, had been distorted by literature. He applied himself to correct that distortion, not by the crass realism of Zola, but by an analysis based on sympathy, warmth, and tenderness. The peasants of his countryside were as important to him as his Parisian colleagues; they were his friends and his neighbors; even the dullest of his servants was not separated from his affection and attention. Animals were his familiars; he visited the Paris zoo regularly with enthusiastic interest, and he knew and felt for the wild and tame creatures of field and barnyard. The Journal celebrates the mystery, strangeness and beauty of bird and beast, seen without romantic coloring within their natural scene.

The final impression received from the Journal is one of delicacy backed up by power—power of character and power of intellect. Again and again those moments of insight appear which can only stem from absolute honesty of perception added to complete largeness of spirit. At these moments we understand why Renard’s compatriots have not hesitated, some fifty years after his death, to name him among the masters.

The Journal, spanning twenty-four years, is a very long book. In its latest edition, the compact volume put out by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1960, it runs to 1267 pages. In making a selection that would place the writer and his preoccupations before the American reader, we have necessarily had to leave out, not only a large body of “writer’s notes,” but whole topics—such as Jules Renard’s periods of service in the army; his accounts of the many literary banquets for which the period was famous; his espousal of the cause of Dreyfus (for he was an impassioned dreyfusard, and backed Zola with enthusiasm and indignation); his near-discipleship of the celebrated Socialist leader, Jean Jaurès; and his adoption—which appears more romantic than practical—of socialism. There are also a number of entries that are too topical to be of interest in this country and this time.

We have tried to establish, by the very things left out, a sort of continuity. In the texts we have chosen, the pleasures are many. There are, always, the single descriptive phrases, usually centered around an image that is at once poetic and piercingly exact; the insights into people and situations; the sketches of “his country” (one wishes he had done the same for Paris); the literary comment. Among the “threads” that run through the years we see the life of the writer as a man of letters, both in what it meant to him personally and in its aspect of worldly success—the gloire he always longed for but never quite achieved. We have his family life, especially the strange interrelationships of his parents and himself; we have the Paris friends, the big names—Sarah Bernhardt, Edmond Rostand, Lucien Guitry; and the country people to whom he always returned. As Léon Guichard wrote: “The Journal is a mine of inexhaustible riches.” We have tried to extract its core.

 

—Louise Bogan

 

BEFORE 1887

 

A bronze bust of Jules Renard stands in the village of Chitry, some one hundred forty miles south of Paris. This was not, however, his birthplace. He was born, in 1864, at Châlons-sur-Mayenne, where his father was in charge of certain construction operations. But the elder Renard’s place of origin was Chitry, and he brought his family back to it while his youngest son, on whose life and work the region was to exert so deep an influence, was still in his infancy. M. Renard père was shortly elected mayor of the village, apparently for life.

The future writer’s childhood was a disaster. He had an older sister, Amélie, and an older brother, Maurice, mentioned at some length in the Journal. M. Renard, embittered by the death of a firstborn daughter he had deeply loved, paid little attention to his other children. He was taciturn, violently anticlérical, rigidly honest. Mme. Renard was a bigot, and a compulsive talker and fibber. Shortly after the birth of her youngest son, her husband ceased speaking to her, and he never spoke to her again. Whether because of this coincidence or for some other reason, she came to vent all her frustration, resentment, and humiliation on this last child. Jules Renard later described his bitter childhood—from which he never entirely recovered—in a number of short pieces that were first published in different periodicals and then collected under the title Poil de Carotte (“Carrot-top”—he was a redhead). The bleak boarding school in Nevers to which he and his brother were sent became a haven to him, a place of refuge from his family.

When he was seventeen, his father, at the instance of his school principal, sent him to Paris to study rhetoric at the Lycée Charlemagne and to obtain his baccalauréat.