A rare and winning combination: a serious person who seldom takes himself seriously. He keeps his ego a little off to the side, muffled, away from the business at hand. It never disappears. It just grows dormant, like some cases of tuberculosis. Jules Renard is such a man and writer, an aphorist and wit with the soul of a peasant. Often, he thinks like a farmer – practical, focused, unsentimental – while writing like a satirist. Here is Renard in his Journal, bargaining with fate on October 17, 1899: “Of all that we write, posterity will retain a page, at best. I would prefer to choose the page myself.”
Renard writing as a
commonsensical critic, September 6, 1902: “A great poet need only employ the
traditional forms. We can leave it to lesser poets to worry themselves with
making reckless gestures.”
More writerly common
sense, November 27, 1895: “Keep their interest! Keep their interest! Art is no
excuse for boring people.”
A lesson for “cancel
culture, August 1896: “We always confound the man and the artist, merely
because chance has brought them together in the same body. La Fontaine wrote
immoral letters to his womenfolk, which does not prevent us from admiring him.
It is quite simple: Verlaine had the genius of a god, and the soul of a pig.
Those who were close to him must have suffered. It was their own fault! – they made
the mistake of being there.”
Renard sounding like the
premise of a story by Maupassant, September 29, 1897: “Some men give the
impression of having married solely to prevent their wives from marrying other
men.”
On why some of us become
writers, May 9, 1898: “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it
does not precede writing.”
Renard was born on this
date, February 22, in 1864 and died of arteriosclerosis in 1910 at age
forty-six. With Montaigne and Proust, he is the French writer I most rely on.
[All quoted passages are
from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and
introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
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