Description

FIRST EDITION
One of 10 copies on coloured parchment reserved for the author (this one blue) after 30 on Hollande Van Gelder vellum and 85 on Lafuma-Navarre pur fil vellum.
SIGNED AUTOGRAPH CONSIGNMENT the author's adopted daughter Céline :

When I think of
my death, I don't think
not mine. I
say: what will become of Ma Céline?
This kind of alienation
is sensitive only to God
M Jouhandeau

In 1951, Élise and Marcel Jouhandeau became the guardians of Liliane Lécuyer, known as Céline. In 1962, fed up with Élise's malice, Céline fled; Jouhandeau looked after the girl he considered his daughter; pregnant by a lover who abandoned her, Céline married Marcel Ronseaux on 8 September 1962; little Marc was born on 13 December; Ronseaux turned out to be a very violent person, tormenting little Marc and Céline.
The copy of Céline's L'École des Filles (sold at auction in April 2012), also on coloured paper, sent in January 1963, a few months before the present copy, illustrates Jouhandeau's strong attachment to his pupil: " But the love I have for Céline is even more inexplicable. It seems to me that no one has ever loved a person so much for no reason that we know of, or because of some kind of magical and irresistible attraction with a charm that is as powerful as it is serious and as pure as it is sweet. Is this the essence of paternal love?... Céline was proposed to me and I adopted her with an immediate and continuous adhesion of my whole being that has never been denied. In this kind of love of the absolute, there is something that embraces the universal and the eternal, that is to say that Céline (and now Céline and her son) are more intimate to me than myself, are more necessary to my happiness than my own, that if they disappeared life for me would no longer have any meaning.... ".

Nice provenance.