Description

AUTOGRAPH NOTEBOOK, WITNESS TO THE FIRST SKETCHES OF GILLES' CHARACTERSwas probably composed in 1924-1925, and the pages on the reverse in 1937-1938 (this is the date suggested, albeit with some reservations, by the number of the Cahiers de la NRF devoted to the diaries of Drieu La Rochelle - the complete transcription of the diary occupies 8 pages).

On the reverse, it includes autobiographical fragments about the author's relationship with Constance Wash, already prepared for a novelistic transcription: Constance Wash would in fact inspire the character of Dora in Gilles (1939).

the American woman who told him = I would never have achieved happiness if he hadn't forced me [...].

Before she leaves she has a cynical conversation with someone [...].

Running of the bulls changes many things
fullness and disorder
then blames him:
1°) jealousy
disappointed by non-jealousy [...]

Gilles lets himself go
the trunk
sets conditions for marriage
the money
the 3 confessions (desert
(spot
he wants to break
or he doesn't want it
[...]

1°) Receives letters and telegrams
answers what?
wants to break up
2°) Returns to Paris
it is difficult to see
is afraid of Percy [Constance Wash's husband] - important
at Colette
I pulled myself together
Percy calls the mother
3°) Takes leave
goes south
4°) love warms you up
5°) everything is arranged
6°) the mother - he discovers himself
7°) farewell
8°) the letter

In a second part of the notebook, written on the back, the names of the characters from Gilles, which Drieu la Rochelle began writing in 1937:

Carentan at Gambier
___
Announcing Paul's illness

The notebook covers a period ranging from the first autobiographical stammerings of Gilles in defining the plot. But it also seems to have been used to record a few reflections 'caught on the fly', which already express the main themes of the work: Drieu evokes the decadence of the modern world, a recurring theme in literature and extreme right-wing ideology, in which anti-Semitism is integrated as one of the "commonplaces in this school of thought"(Bihr, p. 67).

The Jews are a blush on the face of decadence

[...]

Eliminate the Jews, what's left of the labour movement?

[...]

Fascists engage in theoretical reaction just as others engage in theoretical revolution. But there is something vital in reaction that I don't think can be reduced.

In GillesDrieu le Rochelle, that, according to Emmanuel Berl, anti-Semitism "around 1934, as a form of diabetes."In this way, the figure of the Jew becomes both the symbol and the vector of an essentially decadent modernity, marked as it is by abstraction. Alain Bihr points out:

Summing up all the remarks and reflections on the Jews that pepper the novel, we can say that, for Drieu, the Jew is at once the Stock Exchange, the Sorbonne and the Palais Bourbon, three institutions that are equally abhorrent to him. (p. 70) As for modernity, it is essentially presented as an artificial and sterile era, in which abstraction reigns in its various forms: commercial and monetary, legal and political, intellectual and scientific. Extreme right-wing thinking contrasts this with the realities and values of the land, the immediacy of power relations, faith and desire (p.79).

A precious archive documenting the genesis of the author's masterpiece. 

References :
Bihr Alain. About Drieu la Rochelle's Gilles. Some ideas for a critique of contemporary anti-Semitism. In: Present reasonNo. 125, 1st quarter 1998. De la vie domestique. pp. 67-81.
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Julien Hervier.  Playing Danzig at a football match: Carnets Intimes 1909-1942, Gallimard Les Cahiers De La Nrf , 14 October 2021.