15 - BOUSQUET, Joë (1897–1950).

BOUSQUET, Joë (1897–1950). Autograph manuscript signed “Joe Bousquet,” including a signed letter sent to Pierre-Louis FLOUQUET, Carcassonne, October 12, 1947; 17 pages in-8 and 4 pages in-8 in black and red ink, housed in a beige glossy calfskin folder with flaps, titled on the top cover. Spiritual Testament (B. Bichon). A lengthy philosophical response to an inquiry in the form of a spiritual testament. Description: “In what state have recent events left me?—Full of hope and exhausted”… He wastes his time reading and delving into the doctrines that are proposed, but he cannot deny the faith he has placed in people, and when they toy with notions he knows to be fruitless, he feels as though he is foundering. “I know that death and misfortune are mere images, and nothing that brings us into the world each day remains within us in the form of a danger. Decay and misery are human creations”… He analyzes his thinking in relation to Christianity, in a “Christianist” era. “The only morality I accept is one that acknowledges this congenital misery and posits, above all, that we are not half-born”… It is true that his moral stance is simplified to the extreme… He argues that self-knowledge is a difficult, if not impossible, endeavor; he discusses the existentialists and Sartre’s *What Is Literature?* and affirms his conviction that man changes himself, while “the science of man (anatomy, physiology)” seems to him to be “fabricated by madmen”… He illustrates this point by offering various definitions of the eye, and pays homage to Proust in passing… He concludes by speaking of the art of writing: “Poetry creates facts. It enters into chance to turn it into a source of life. We will present to people, to the imagination of people, the reality of which they are but shadows”… He addresses this manuscript to the Belgian poet Pierre-Louis FLOUQUET (1900–1967), editor of the *Journal des poètes*, with this confession: “I cannot think of you without feeling compelled to write a sort of spiritual testament. […] Every morning multiplies around me the reasons to despair and stirs within my heart the essence of joy, and this incomprehensible happiness is what compels my hand as I gather—like a thousand echoes of the hunt and the forest—the repeated evidence that I must distance myself from my name, regard it as insignificant, and consign it myself to oblivion”…