Adrienne Monnier, born on April 26, 1892, in Paris, where she died on June 19, 1955, was a French bookseller, book publisher, organizer of literary evenings and encounters, writer, and poet.

---

## Resources

[Adrienne Monnier to Jean Paulhan, correspondence (1926-1936), OBVIL Hyper Paulhan project](https://obvil.sorbonne-universite.fr/corpus/paulhan/monnier)

[Adrienne Monnier: "I opened my bookshop out of love for books, I wanted to read everything that has been written in the world" - France Culture](https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-nuits-de-france-culture/nuit-de-la-librairie-12-211-profils-perdus-adrienne-monnier-12-1ere-diffusion-01121988) 
Adrienne Monnier explains how she became a bookseller and shares her literary tastes (or dislikes), from Dada to James Joyce, through Saint-Exupery, Jules Romain, and Hemingway.

[Adrienne Monnier on Apollinaire, Breton, and Aragon - INA radio 1947](https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/audio/p18162060/adrienne-monnier-a-propos-de-guillaume-apollinaire-andre-breton-et-louis)
Adrienne Monnier recalls her encounter with Andre Breton, Aragon, and Guillaume Apollinaire. She remembers that Andre Breton was deeply impressed by the poet.

[Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, booksellers and pioneers of 20th-century literary life](https://www.unidivers.fr/adrienne-monnier-sylvia-beach-libraires/)

See [The editorial board of "Mesures"](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/crgdx75), Sylvia Beach, [Barbara Church](/personnes/barbara-church), Vladimir Nabokov, [Adrienne Monnier](/personnes/adrienne-monnier), [Germaine Paulhan](/famille/germaine-paulhan), [Henri Church](/personnes/henry-church), [Henri Michaux](/auteurs/henri-michaux), [Jean Paulhan](/auteurs/jean-paulhan), [Michel Leiris](/auteurs/michel-leiris) - photographed by Gisele Freund in 1937, CGP.

Adrienne Monnier

Cover of the first issue of the journal Mesures


(text to come)

---

## Resources

See [The editorial board of "Mesures"](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/crgdx75), Sylvia Beach, [Barbara Church](/personnes/barbara-church), Vladimir Nabokov, [Adrienne Monnier](/personnes/adrienne-monnier), [Germaine Paulhan](/famille/germaine-paulhan), [Henri Church](/personnes/henry-church), [Henri Michaux](/auteurs/henri-michaux), [Jean Paulhan](/auteurs/jean-paulhan), [Michel Leiris](/auteurs/michel-leiris) - photographed by Gisele Freund in 1937, CGP.


Barbara Church


An ecologist ahead of his time, Claude Balyne helped, together with his wife, the cultural influence of the island of Port-Cros.
Claude Balyne, whose real name was Jean Picard, was a poet and sub-prefect in Orange. In autumn 1918, while suffering from tuberculosis, Claude Balyne, who was also a notary, fell under the spell of Port-Cros and decided to settle there to enjoy its pure air and unique charm. He convinced his wife to join him.

Once in Port-Cros, she fell in love with the island's beauty. An intelligent and cultivated woman, she decided to develop tourism there by opening the Auberge Pascal, still known as the Hotellerie Provencale.

In 1929, Claude Balyne published _L'ile fee. Port-Cros en Mediterranee_, a work in which he evokes the beauty of the island.

The couple also decided to work for the island's preservation and contributed to its classification in 1930 among natural sites of artistic character.

The couple's inn became so successful that it attracted to Port-Cros many artists, writers, and famous personalities who, like Claude Balyne and his wife, were interested in ecology and respectful of the island's landscape.

One could then see Jules Supervielle and his family, Valery's and Malraux's daughters, the Renaud-Barraults, and even the famous American novelist Robert Penn Warren, to name only a few.

The couple thus played a major role in the influence of Port-Cros. However, the person who most marked the island and definitively made it a favorite destination for the most gifted writers and artists of their time was Jean Paulhan, then head of the _Nouvelle Revue Francaise_.

[Claude Balyne, Port-Cros](https://www.portcros-parcnational.fr/fr/des-connaissances/patrimoine-culturel/les-personnages-celebres/litterature/claude-balyne)

[Port-Cros National Park](https://www.portcros-parcnational.fr/fr)

[An old 18th-century mill in Porquerolles is fully restored](https://www.portcros-parcnational.fr/fr/videos/vieux-du-xviiie-siecle-le-moulin-de-porquerolles-est-entierement-renove)


Claude Balyne

Florence Gould, born Florence La Caze in San Francisco in 1895 and died in Cannes in 1983, is an American writer and salon maker.  
She married billionaire Frank Jay Gould in 1923.

---

## Resources

Florence Gould


Gaston Gallimard, born on January 18, 1881, in Paris and died on December 25, 1975, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, was a French publisher, founder of Editions Gallimard, which held a major place in twentieth-century French literary life. He also led extra-literary ventures: theater administrator, press owner, film producer, and concert organizer.

---

## Resources


Gaston Gallimard

_Giovanni Vailati (April 24, 1863 – May 14, 1909), proto-analytic philosopher, historian of science and mathematician._

---

## Resources

[Texts by and about Vailati](https://archive.org/details/giovannivailati100papi/page/n5/mode/2up) 
in L'Anima, saggi e giudizi" (maggio 1911: anno I, no. 5) by Giovanni Amendola and Giovanni Papini. Note an advertisement for _Le Spectateur_&nbsp; by René-Martin Guelliot.

[La filosofia secondo Vailati - Giovanni Papini](https://archive.org/details/giovannivailati100papi/page/134/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater)

[Dalle letterse di G. Vailati (letters from G.V. to a few)](https://archive.org/details/giovannivailati100papi/page/138/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater)

Giovanni Vailati

Couverture du premier numéro de la revue Mesures

## The school of modesty

It is difficult, once we have once formed it, not to be more preoccupied than is reasonable by the idea that as children we had to make certain very serious interior decisions, to which our mood, our fantasy, who knows our conduct, still stems today. But what if we had taken them lightly, without knowing the facts? This is apt to worry us. We then decide to flatter the child we must have been. We try to win it – to start it again. We say to ourselves that childhood, after all, was the virgin world, faith, poetry. We even end up believing it.  
But Henry Church hardly shows this concern. Did he even have a childhood? He doesn't see her. It is as if the decisions in question were taken yesterday, and there was still time, in haste of course, to take them again.

There has been no shortage of works for some fifty years, the main theme of which was anxiety, cataclysm, catastrophe. We can even say that there were too many. Don't come and tell me that the world wasn't happy. First of all it would have been a reason for literature to be so, what is this resignation? Then, it may be that a single joyful writer would have changed many things. Let's leave it at that.  
Henry Church was not exempt. Anxiety erupts on every page of his stories in the form of allusions, such as assassination, suicide, fits of drunkenness or madness. But madness, suicide or assassination remain spontaneous and rather innocent for him. As if it had been so close. As if there was still time to start all over again. Other worried people were more violent or more concentrated, more passionate or more lyrical. He shows us worry in all its freshness.

In all novels there is a painful moment to go through: it is when the hero takes off from his character (and from reality), and cheerfully advances towards the great meaning, the symbol. Here the good novelist knows how to arrange slips, organizes traps, finally chooses, to deprive his man of a last remnant of humanity, the moment when no one is looking at him.  
But it is enough for Henry Church, in his tales, to let the deep embarrassment act, and to form the unbreathable atmosphere which pure and restless hearts spread around them. His characters resist as long as they can, before modestly withdrawing.

Here is the tale of the Clowns: a young American is going to spend the evening at his club. It is a circle richly housed for several months: in marble. (Here, a little story of the circle.) There he dreams of the platitude of the time, of trade unionism, of free thought, of symbolism — then dozes off. A new character appears, the Colonel. He downright misses the good old days (candles, nymphs, pleasures of the fields). As proof, he will tell a little story.  
The hero of the short story is a good drunk, Jack, who puts on a frock coat and top hat to pilgrimage to the vineyards of Burgundy (short story of the pilgrimage). Now this Jack one day takes the Colonel on an excursion to the Blue Meadows. The two friends climb a mountain, contemplate the Ohio valley, have lunch on the grass. And then...  
Notice that the tale is coming to an end. Well, that's when they meet clowns in the open fields. Real clowns, whose faces are smeared with white, their eyebrows drawn in black pencil. But these clowns ask them for advice. They are dealing with a clown candidate, whose behavior baffles them. But here is the candidate:

The strangeness of his appearance, from the beginning, surprised us. He wasn't doing anything that clowns usually do. At first he stood still, making vague gestures with his hands as if juggling imaginary objects, opening and closing his mouth in a slow rhythm. Then he looked at us to see if we were following his idea. Suddenly he started running like a madman. Then, stopping suddenly, he did a pirouette and seemed to sketch the movement of a somersault, without actually doing it.

The end of the tale is sad. The indignant spectators rush towards the unfortunate joker and more or less massacre him. Hurdley and the Colonel just have to go home. The Colonel and Church meet up at their club. Everything folds up, everything is finished.  
It seems to me that Henry Church founded a school that day that I will happily call the School of Modesty. It is a school which has followed its course, and exercised its influence, modestly.

Jean Paulhan, 1948.

See the [tribute issue of the magazine Mesures](/revues/measures#1940-2)

---

## Resources

See [The editorial staff of "Measures"](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/crgdx75), Sylvia Beach, [Barbara Church](/people/barbara-church), Vladimir Nabokov, [Adrienne Monnier](/people/adrienne-monnier), [Germaine Paulhan](/family/germaine-paulhan), [Henri Church](/people/henry-church), [Henri Michaux](/authors/henri-michaux), [Jean Paulhan](/authors/jean-paulhan), [Michel Leiris](/authors/michel-leiris) - photographed by Gisèle Freund in 1937, CGP.

Henry Church

Marcel Henry, notary, husband of Marceline Henry, visionary, lover of letters and nature, who devoted her life to Port-Cros. Together, they developed both a tourist activity with the opening of the Hôtellerie Provençale, but also a desire to preserve the island by its registration on March 17, 1930 among the natural sites and monuments of an artistic character at the request of the Minister of National Education and Fine Arts. Her influence with the State, with the mayor of Hyères of whom she was deputy, then with scientists from the Paris Museum, enabled the development and influence of Port-Cros.

[Marcel and Marceline HENRY](https://www.portcros-parcnational.fr/fr/des-connaissances/patrimoine-culturel/personnages-celebres/figures-historiques/marcel-et-marceline)

Marcel Henry

Marguerite Chapin, better known as Marguerite Caetani (Waterford, June 24, 1880 – Ninfa, December 17, 1963), was an American publisher, journalist, literary critic, art collector and patron, naturalized Italian, Princess of Bassiano, Duchess of Sermoneta, founder and director of the literary journals _Commerce_ (in France) and _Botteghe Oscure_ (in Italy).

---

## Resources

[Sermoneta e il Giardino di Ninfa. A Parco Letterario by Marguerite Chapin Caetani](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRC0kC6GRVA)

[Il Giardino di Ninfa - Il più bello del monde](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXU3OAoVP7o)

Marguerite Caetani

Marie-Anne Comnène, full name Marianne Françoise Regazzacci-Stephanopoli, born December 3, 1887 in Cargèse (Southern Corsica) and died July 16, 1978 in the same city, is a French novelist, translator and historian, of distant Greek ancestry.

Marie-Anne Comnène is a descendant of Demetrius Stephanopoli of Comnène, whom King Louis XVI recognized as the descendant of the last emperor of Trebizond David II.

On March 9, 1916, she married the French literary critic [Benjamin Crémieux](/auteurs/benjamin-cremieux) (1888-1944).

---

**Resources**

[Marie-Anne Comnène - the Master](https://fusilles-40-44.maitron.fr/comnene-marie-anne-nee-stephanopoli-de-comnene-dite-epouse-cremieux/)

Marie-Anne Comnène

_Maurice Garçon, born November 25, 1889 in Lille and died December 29, 1967 in Paris, is a French lawyer, essayist, lyricist, novelist, polygraphist and historian_. 
_He is best known for having defended a large number of causes, both literary and criminal, notably those of René Hardy, Georges Arnaud, Jean Genet and Jean-Jacques Pauvert_.

---

## Resources

[Response to Jean Paulhan's reception speech](https://www.academie-francaise.fr/reponse-au-discours-de-reception-de-jean-paulhan)

[The Sade Affair](https://www.andrebreton.fr/work/56600100422521) 
Exact account of the trial brought by the Public Prosecutor's Office published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, by Maurice Garçon, with contributions from Georges Bataille, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Jean Paulhan.

[Sade and censorship, L'Express 1957](https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/1957-sade-et-la-censure_1994284.html) 
Master Maurice Garçon and Jean Paulhan discuss Sade, whose publisher is facing censorship.

Maurice Garçon

Critic, founder of “imaginal” criticism. - Professor at the Free University of Brussels (in 1971).

Maurice-Jean Lefebve

_Jean-Jacques Pauvert, born in Paris on April 8, 1926 and died on September 27, 2014 in Toulon, is a French publisher and writer, founder of Éditions Pauvert. He became known above all for the reissue of works that had been forgotten, banned or considered marginal.

---

## Resources

[Jean-Jacques Pauvert, legendary and atypical editor, is dead](https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2014/09/27/mort-de-l-editeur-jean-jacques-pauvert_4495614_3260.html)

[Jean-Jacques Pauvert: “Histoire d’O is a book that shakes something up”](https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-nuits-de-france-culture/jean-jacques-pauvert-histoire-d-o-est-un-livre-qui-bouleverse-quelque-chose-3609502)

[Jean-Jacques Pauvert: obsessed with publishing](https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2007/08/10/jean-jacques-pauvert-l-obsede-de-l-edition_943458_3260.html)

[Some works published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, in the André Breton collection](https://www.andrebreton.fr/fr/publisher/5136)

Jean-Jacques Pauvert

Pierre Gamarra is a French writer born in Toulouse on July 10, 1919 and died in Argenteuil on May 20, 2009. He is a novelist and poet. As a critic, his name is widely associated with the magazine _Europe_, from 1949 to 2009. His works, which cover virtually all genres, also include essays and plays.

Pierre Gamarra is particularly known through his work for young people, frequently taught in schools, as well as for the links that his poetry and novels maintain with Toulouse, Languedoc and South-West France.

---

**Resources**

[Site of the friends of Pierre Gamarra](https://pierregamarra.com/)

[News from Pierre Gamarra](https://pierregamarra.com/actualite/)

Pierre Gamarra est un écrivain français né en 1919 et mort en 2009. Il est romancier et poète.

Pierre Gamarra

René Drouin was born in Pantin in 1905 and was a student at the Special School of Architecture. In 1930, at the age of 25, he became a contemporary furniture designer. He
inaugurates a first art gallery which, initially, is intended more for Decorative Art, in relation
with Leo Castelli, an art dealer who then fled fascist Italy because he was Jewish. For reasons
similar, Castelli left France and left for New York in 1940.

Between 1940 and 1960, René Drouin's gallery welcomed artists who would become major in
the history of abstraction. René Drouin will present “classics”, Kandinsky, for example. To
several times, with great freedom, he will exhibit artists who can then be described as
marginal; for the writing of the catalogues, he does not hesitate to invite writers, also adults,
poets and young art critics. Thus, Jean-Paul Sartre signs the catalog of the exhibition of
Wols in 1943. By the same artist, the 1945 catalog carries a text by Camille Bryen, also
painter. Jean Fautrier's first exhibition saw the light of day in 1943. Proximity and exchanges
with the writers come to nourish the enthusiastic artistic journey of René Drouin, in the process of
decline with certainty. It was again René Drouin who organized Jean Dubuffet's first exhibition in 1944: his 200
drawings are presented by a text by Jean Paulhan, who published, in 1962, “Fautrier l’enragé” and
inaugurates the term and the thought of “Informal art”.

---

## Resources

[René Drouin Gallery, Paris - databnf](https://data.bnf.fr/fr/13568201/galerie_rene_drouin_paris/)

[René Drouin Gallery, Paris - idRef](https://www.idref.fr/086222201)

[René Drouin, an art publisher, a discoverer in the Parisian art market](https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/3846/files/2020/07/Galerie-DROUIN.pdf) 
Round table Laurence Imbernon, Jean-Claude Drouin, Nicole Marchand Zanartu, Claire Paulhan

[René Drouin: When the exhibition catalog becomes an art book](https://madparis.fr/rene-drouin-quand-le-catalogue-d-exposition-devient-livre-d-art) 
Exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts from May 9 to July 23, 2017: <a href="https://madparis.fr/IMG/pdf/290-journal-expo-rene_drouin.pdf">Télécharger the little journal of the exhibition “René Drouin: when the exhibition catalog becomes an art book”</a>

René Drouin

René-Louis Doyon, known as “the Mandarin”, is a French bookseller, publisher, reviewer and writer, born November 3, 1885 in Blida (French Algeria) and died in Paris (13th) on November 10, 1966.

René-Louis Doyon est un libraire, éditeur, revuiste et écrivain français, né en 1885 et mort en 1966.

René-Louis Doyon

Robert Chatté

When, at the instigation of Pierre Boulez,
she founded the Domaine musical in 1954,
Suzanne Tézenas was known for a long time
date of artistic and literary circles
from Paris. Pierre Boulez, who then
29 years old, was music director at the Theater
Marigny, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault and
Madeleine Renaud. They had just moved into
the attic of the theater a rudimentary room, with
wooden benches, which had opened its doors
with “The Evening of Proverbs”, by Georges
Schehade. It was there that took place, under the direction of
Hermann Scherchen, the first concert of
the serial school. Bach, Gesualdo,
Bartok, but especially Messiaen, Varèse, Boulez,
Stockhausen, Nono, Barraqué, Pusher, Berio,
later Boucourechliev or Amy, in short, all those
who had sworn allegiance to the School of
Vienna: Alban Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, but
also to Stravinsky who had just converted there.
The adventure of Domaine musical — led by
Pierre Boulez, then by Gilbert Amy—lasted twenty
years. If, initially, it was only possible thanks to
Barrault-Renaud couple, it is Suzanne Tézenas, both patron, president and secretary of
the association, that we owe its sustainability.

<figure role='group'><img src='/images/divers/tezenas-stockhausen.jpeg' alt=""><figcaption>Stockhausen, for the first time at the Royan Festival in April 1968. He adjusted the filters and electrical regulators for the French creation of Procession. Here, with Suzanne Tézenas, co-founder of Concerts du Domaine Musical.</figcaption</figure>

Suzanne Tézenas has just died at the age of 92. These
In recent years, she lived withdrawn from the world,
after leaving his large apartment on the street
Octave-Feuillet where, for more than forty years,
she had received everything that mattered in terms of
new literature, painting and music.
Everyone brought their friends there. It is at her house that we
saw, barely out of limbo, Cioran, Ionesco,
Schéhadé, Bonnefoy, Gatti, Nimier,
Cioran, from Staël, confronted with their elders: Vieira da Silva,
André Masson, Paulhan, Jouve, Supervielle,
Michaux, Char, Ponge...

It was Suzanne Tézenas who helped Vilar to
stage Adamov's first play. It's at
she who, immediately after the war, landed Moravia, Piovene, Cingria, Graham
Greene. At her house that Pierre Souvtchinsky and
Nicolas Nabokov met their old friend Igor
Stravinsky, just returned from Russia where he came
to be invited by Khrushchev after sixty years
of exile. This is where Messiaen discussed with
Pichette from an opera libretto on Jesus and Nicholas of
Staël of a ballet project with René Char. It's
in the salon of rue Octave-Feuillet that a
Shy American, John Cage, gave Paris his
first concert for “prepared piano”, in 1949.
Without really talking about politics, despite the
tensions of the time, we saw Raymond Aron there
and Saint-John Perse discuss Gaullism and
of Europe or Henri Corbin talking about the existence
angels, in front of Henri Michaux slightly
amazed...

From the moment his young protégés
flew on their own wings, and coming the “great
age » of which Saint-John Perse, Suzanne speaks
Tézenas separated herself from what bore witness
of everything she had done. The documents are
went to the National Library, the papers no longer
intimate at the Jacques-Doucet library. Don't
no longer leaving the tiny apartment where she
was to end her days this month of May, she received
tirelessly Researchers from around the world
whole question him about Drieu La Rochelle, Audiberti, René Daumal, Nicolas de Staël and, well
heard, on the musical field, to which a
professor from Montpellier has just devoted a
doctoral thesis. His memory was infallible.
She was hardly surprised that so many people who
had shared his table are so famous, many posthumously. In the end, no one remained around
of her only photos of the dead. But it is
Pierre Boulez who held, on the day of the funeral,
warm the Calvinist coldness of the temple of
the Oratory, with two clarinet pieces, one of
him, the other from Messiaen. Those who came to say
farewell to “Madame Tézenas” that day knew that
died with her the last symbol of a civilization that we will only know through books. 
(Guy Dumur)

Other people