” Supporters. Kessel and Druon, a family story”, by Dominique Bona: the rowing of shadows

Supporters. Kessel and Druon, a family story

by Dominique Bona

Gallimard, 528 p., 24 €

The premiere of Le Chant des partisans, in London in 1943, to music by Anna Marly, turned out to be the finest episode in this chivalrous epic of the Resistance, which even blended bravery and poetry to myth. Joseph Kessel and his nephew of mysterious birth and already romantic, Maurice Druon, brave patriots, wrote the words of this hymn against Nazi enslavement.

Dominique Bona retraces the destiny of these two academicians who worked for each other for a long time. The Jewish question separated them. And then Kessel continues to frequent the lowlands, while Druon has nothing left but for the highlands. On the other hand: “They are both Casanovas in their lives, that too brings them closer, or can put them in competition. »

Beneath the fatuity

With finesse and insight, the author, who sits Quai Conti herself, connects existences to works, brings out themes and obsessions, unravels the taste of vainglory with a depth that is sometimes encrypted. Maurice Druon, who wore a cocked hat, monocle and pommel cane like no one else, wanted to be the last horseman of the Academy. Beneath his fatuity lay a moving being, whom this book makes us taste not without retrospective tenderness, but knowing how to keep a critical distance.

We forgave everything to the one who defended the French language like a convulsionary, who received Vladimir Poutine in 2003, in his dear abbey in Gironde, to ride the two horses gifts from the King of Morocco. Dominique Bona does us the honors of a historical and literary bubble, where everything is luxury, pangs and voluptuousness. We get used to it over the pages. And we feel the death of Kessel then of Druon like wrenching.

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