Octave Mirbeau’s sharp and witty 1910 preface to Marie-Claire, celebrating Marguerite Audoux’s remarkable novel. A seamstress turned writer, Audoux created a masterpiece that impressed even France’s literary elite with its natural genius and profound simplicity.
One evening, Francis Jourdain told me about the painful life of a woman he was very close to.
A seamstress, constantly ill, desperately poor, sometimes without bread—her name was Marguerite Audoux. Despite all her courage, unable to work anymore or even read, as her eyes caused her terrible suffering, she wrote.
She wrote not hoping to publish her work, but to keep her mind off her misery, to amuse her solitude, as if for company, and also, I suspect, because she loved writing.
He knew of one work by her, Marie-Claire, which he thought quite beautiful. He asked me to read it. I value Francis Jourdain’s taste enormously. His turn of mind, his sensibility, satisfy me infinitely… As he handed me the manuscript, he added:
“Our dear Philippe admired this tremendously… He would have loved to see this book published. But what could he do for others when he could do nothing for himself?”
I’m convinced that good books possess an indestructible power… However distant their origins, however buried they may be in the forgotten miseries of a worker’s home, they always reveal themselves… Of course, people detest them… They deny them and insult them… What does it matter? They are stronger than everything and everyone.
And the proof is that Marie-Claire appears today in volume form, published by Fasquelle.
It gives me pleasure to speak of this admirable book, and I would like, with all my soul’s conviction, to interest in it all those who still love reading. Like me, they will taste rare joys in it, they will feel a new and powerful emotion.
Marie-Claire is a work of great taste. Its simplicity, its truth, its elegance of spirit, its depth, its freshness are striking. Everything is in its place—the things, the landscapes, the people. They are marked, drawn with a stroke, exactly the stroke needed to make them alive and unforgettable. You never wish for another, so right is this one, so picturesque, so coloured, so perfectly placed. What astonishes us most, what captivates us, is the force of the interior action, and all the gentle, singing light that rises over this book, like the sun on a beautiful summer morning. And one often feels the phrase of the great writers pass by: a sound we no longer hear, almost never anymore, and at which our spirit marvels.
And here is the miracle:
Marguerite Audoux wasn’t some “intellectual déclassée”—she was indeed the little seamstress who sometimes does day work for bourgeois households, earning three francs, sometimes works at home in a room so cramped you have to move the dress form to reach the sewing machine.
She has told how, when in her youth she was tending sheep on a farm in Sologne, the discovery of an old book in an attic revealed to her the world of stories. From that day on, with growing passion, she read everything that fell into her hands—serials, old almanacs, etc. She was seized by a vague, unformulated desire to write stories herself one day. And this desire came true the day the doctor, consulted at the Hôtel-Dieu, forbade her to sew on pain of going blind.
Journalists have imagined that Marguerite Audoux then exclaimed: “Since I can no longer sew a bodice, I’ll make a book.” This legend, capable of satisfying both the bourgeois taste for the extraordinary and their contempt for literature, is false and absurd.
In the author of Marie-Claire, the taste for literature isn’t separate from a superior curiosity about life, and what she amused herself noting down was quite simply the spectacle of daily life, but even more what she imagined, what she divined about the existence of people she encountered. Already, her gifts of intuition equalled her powers of observation… She never spoke to anyone about this “mania” for scribbling, and burnt her scraps of paper, which she thought couldn’t interest anyone. It took chance leading her into a milieu frequented by some young artists for her to realise how much her gift for narrative seduced them, how much it gripped them. Charles-Louis Philippe particularly encouraged her, but never gave her advice. Addressed to a woman whose sensibility was already so educated, whose will was so determined, whose temperament so assured, he felt such advice would be even more useless than dangerous.
In our era, all cultivated people, and those who think they are, care greatly about returning to tradition and speak of imposing strict discipline on themselves… Isn’t it delicious that it’s a working woman, ignorant of spelling, who rediscovers, or rather invents these great qualities of sobriety, taste, evocation, which experience and will alone never achieve?
Will, moreover, isn’t lacking in Marguerite Audoux, and as for experience, what takes its place is this innate sense of language that allows her, not to write like a sleepwalker, but to work her sentence, to balance it, to simplify it, with a rhythm whose laws she hasn’t learned to know, but of which she has, in her sure genius, a marvellous and mysterious awareness. She is gifted with imagination, but let’s be clear, a noble, ardent and magnificent imagination, which isn’t that of young women who dream or novelists who plot. She is neither beside nor beyond life; she seems only to extend observed facts and make them clearer. If I were a critic, or, God forbid, a psychologist, I would call this imagination a deductive imagination. But I won’t venture onto that perilous ground.
Read Marie-Claire… And when you have read it, without wanting to offend anyone, you will wonder which among our writers—and I speak of the most glorious—could have written such a book, with this impeccable measure, this radiant purity and grandeur.
1910.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 