Alphonse de CHÂTEAUBRIANT. LAS. Le Petit Portail (Loire-Atla - Lot 15

Alphonse de CHÂTEAUBRIANT. LAS. Le Petit Portail (Loire-Atlantique), January 26, 1914. 2 ff. Rather personal letter, written with style and detail, from a family estate around Nantes, in which he talks about his morale and his joy at once again corresponding with such a dear friend and a kindred spirit, initiated into writing or the problems of writers. He also talks about his forthcoming move to Versailles, where he will indeed spend the war. About this friend, he asks him about his intense writing work, and a work he is preparing on Napoleon. We know of an important correspondence between the collaborationist author and Romain Rolland (L'Un et l'autre, 1914-1944, Albin Michel), precisely from 1914 onwards. Rolland wrote a little opuscule on Napoleon that has not yet appeared in print, and it is highly likely that he was the recipient of this letter, which would be the starting point for these years of exchanges. Alphonse van Bredenbeck de Châteaubriant (1877-1951), a Catholic writer and winner of the 1911 Prix Goncourt, was an intellectual who fraternized with the Nazis (he was sentenced to death in absentia and died in Austria), but was also a Dreyfus supporter.