Guillaume de Tarde & Jean Paulhan, 1904-1920
Guillaume de TardeJean PaulhanTowards the end of the 19th century, in a small suburban garden, two 10-year-old children, Jean and Guillaume, become acquainted because their fathers, Frédéric Paulhan and Gabriel de Tarde, have maintained a philosophical correspondence for a long time. This meeting will be followed by seventy-four years of deep friendship.
However, ten years later, everything should separate the two teenagers: social origins, living conditions, political tendencies...
Jean Paulhan, only son, lives with his family, surrounded by a brilliant and restless swarm of young foreign students. Indeed, his mother ensures, at the cost of exhausting work, the material life of her family, by running a family boarding house.
As for Guillaume de Tarde, although his family owned a castle in the Dordogne, a sign of relative wealth, he lost his father, a magistrate in Sarlat, at a very young age.
However, the two young people share everything, at least a lot: the lack of money, the race for private lessons, the outings, the association with young Russian anarchists (female), not without fleeting jealousies, the enthusiasms, the hopes, the discouragements, the courses and even the writing of endless philosophy homework submitted to the Sorbonne under their double signature.
From 1904 to 1920, Jean Paulhan and Guillaume de Tarde took exams, competitive exams, experienced military service, then that of war, one living in Madagascar, the other in Morocco. Jean Paulhan marries and publishes his first books. These were years of great instability, especially for Jean Paulhan, who moved a lot, traveled, looked for work, changed jobs often, and wrote for numerous magazines. In 1920, he joined the N.R.F., where he remained until his death.
It is this epistolary exchange, covering the period during which man searches for himself and forms himself, that we have chosen to publish in this first notebook.
Publisher : Gallimard