Lettres de Madagascar, 1907 - 1910
Jean Paulhan“At the dawn of the 20th century, Jean Paulhan came to live in Madagascar: “There are countries with red hills where we find small green lakes. It's a very good country. And then we are free.” he then confided to his closest friend, Guillaume de Tarde. Appointed to the new College of Tananarive – which had just been founded by Governor General Augagneur –, the young professor took an interest in the Malagasy people and their language, collected traditional proverbs in the process of being forgotten, the Hain-Teny, but soon came up against the manners of officials and settlers.
These 121 letters addressed to his family during the three years of his stay form an ingenuous testimony, often critical and sometimes visionary, on the daily life of a Colony. But Madagascar is above all the initiatory place where the dreaming young man, far from the influence of his family and his fiancée, passed into adulthood. It was also there that his taste for language and its secret powers took root…
“It’s cold in our house this evening,” he wrote to his mother in July 1909. Now night has come. Soon Autret [his roommate] will come home and we will have dinner. […] Then we will go down into the city and as soon as we pass the Queen's palace it will suddenly be very hot. Then we will stop running. We will not smoke but we will walk very slowly and chat with people on the road. We will pass between the college and the trees of the Andohalo garden. […] When we are at the end of the garden, I will say to Autret: “Are we going to Antaninarenina?” This is the beautiful neighborhood, that of the residence and ramatoas of good people. “No,” Autret will say, “we must not accustom ourselves to luxury.” Then we will take another long tour through small streets, through sand and piles of ashes, with a lantern in our hand. We often disguised ourselves as Malagasy, with our bare feet in a sort of monk's sandals, in a large lamba, and our faces a little blackened. and we sometimes talked with other Malagasy people without being recognized. We were proud.”
Laurence Ink, historian and novelist, has lived in Madagascar for several years. She has already published several works, including It's enough to believe (Laffont, 1994), La Terre de Caïn (Laffont, 1996), Chants de coral et d'argent (Laffont, 2001), Trap in the forest (Gallimard Jeunesse, 2004). For these Letters from Madagascar, she focused her critical approach on the historical and sociological context of these years, which are still very little described in the literature on the Big Island.
536 pages. Around 100 illustrations, maps and facsimiles n. & bl. 13 x 21.5 cm.
Appendices: Inventory of the Malagasy Library of Jean and Frédéric Paulhan; Glossary of Malagasy words; Index.
Collection “Correspondences of Jean Paulhan”.
Draw: 900 numbered copies.
ISBN: 2-912222-25-7
Public price: €41.
Note also the parallel reprint of Hain-Teny Merinas in facsimile, preceded by an unpublished preface by B. Baillaud at the Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner.
Editeur : Claire Paulhan