Terreurs d’enfance. Notes désaccordées sur Paul Morand

Opening a book by Paul Morand will just at once plunge you into a flood of horribly discordant sounds. This writer, indeed, goes straight where the world cracks, where it explodes under the bouts of, notably, revolutions and counter-revolutions. However Morand confers an eminently droll character on these extremely violent scenes. He is as the amused spectator of a little theatre where the most ferocious dictators look like children gone wild. We shall question if it is a matter here of derealizing the History of men (a History in which he sometimes was directly involved) or then of taking one’s cut, as one cuts one’s losses, in what childhood, according to him, always partakes of the inhuman.