Louis-Ferdinand Céline / Signed handwritten letter / Lucette / Love & Tenderness

  
Autograph letter signed “LF” to Jean-Gabriel Daragnès
S. [Copenhagen], “Sunday” [25 June 1950], 4 pp.
Traces of period folds, tiny red stains at the upper right corner of each leaf.

Céline gives news of Lucette after a post-operative complication, then ends his letter with medical advice for his friend’s wife. We are returning to Korsør on Tuesday afternoon. Lucette is leaving the hospital, not yet completely cured — but I’ll take care of her there. Write to me there if you would be so kind.

Her spirits are excellent, smiling and infinitely courageous as usual. I must keep myself on guard against her natural heroism, be wary of it! In any case, I think she’ll be better soon. She is delighted with your dressing gown.

It was needed to brighten up Mik [Kelsen]’s cupboard while waiting for the taxi that is to take us to Korsør, 150 kroner out of my pocket! Luckily, thanks to you, Monnier and the Pastor [François Löchen], we have a little pocket money.

These six weeks have been catastrophic for our very precarious finances! Everyone at the hospital was extremely kind to us — nurses, doctors, separate room, etc. The post-operative complication was unfortunate, that’s all — a new method — justified — but one that did not work out well with Lucette. Suddenly suffocating, in this country that is always so cold. And then Lucette, too courageous, whose movements were too broad.

Here they are used to patients who are shriveled, fussy, and numb. In short, a nasty fiasco, septic complications considered shameful 30 years ago. Still, I think we’re going to renew our lease on life.

I’m going to dive back into the manuscript [Céline was then in the middle of writing Féerie pour une autre fois II]. Her liver is surely the cause. But nothing is more complex than hepatic syndromes, and especially the treatments for these conditions. First of all, complete abstinence from everything, to wipe the slate clean — to see things clearly. With warmest affection to you both.

”

1 - The return to Korsør does indeed take place on Tuesday, 27 June, a date confirmed by his letter to Marie Canavaggia of the 1st. The Sunday immediately preceding, as indicated in the heading of the letter, can therefore only be 25 June.
2 - In another unpublished letter from the same period, Céline gives Daragnès dietary hygiene advice, which was therefore also intended for his wife.

However, it was Jean-Gabriel Daragnès who, one month later, on 25 July 1950, died following surgery. He came to know Céline through Gen-Paul and Marcel Aymé, but only became close to him later, when the author of Journey to the End of the Night, acting as a doctor, treated his mother, who was gravely ill.

Daragnès was one of the first people Céline wrote to after his imprisonment in Denmark. He thus became his man of trust in France, his informant in Montmartre, his intermediary with publishers, and even agreed in 1949 to act personally on his behalf before the Court of Justice. Daragnès came to Denmark twice, in 1948, as commissioner of the French Book exhibition in Copenhagen, and did not fail to visit the exile on those occasions. When he suddenly died in 1950 following an operation, Céline lost one of his strongest supporters. In an intermediate version of his novel Féerie pour une autre fois, written in Denmark, he describes him as “the greatest engraver in France.

”

Autograph letters sale, Drouot, 5 June 1992, expert Frédéric Castaing, no.
Henri Godard, Du Lérot, 1984, p.
Henri Godard and Jean-Paul Louis, Pléiade, 2009, no.