Louis-Ferdinand CÉLINE. Autograph manuscript for... Lot 367

Louis-Ferdinand CÉLINE. Autograph manuscript for L'École des cadavres, [1938]; 5 folios in-4 plus 2 corrected typewritten ff. (pinholes). Working manuscript with corrected typescript for a passage from the pamphlet. L'École des cadavres, a sequel to Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), was written during the summer of 1938 in Dinard and Saint-Malo, and published on November 24, 1938 by Éditions Denoël. This manuscript has variants with the definitive text (p. 243-245 of the original edition), and belongs to sequence 80. The autograph leaves are paginated 1-5; a typewritten leaf, extensively corrected, has been inserted and pinned (as shown by the traces) between pages 3 and 4; finally 2 typewritten and corrected leaves are paginated 6 and 7 and give the end of the sequence. "The great proletarian triumph in those days of the damnedly simple consisted of machine-gunning on the fly, bottle-butting, furious bursts of heavy cavalry protection. Let the shards burst horribly, full of helmets [...] I was often in contact with the rioters, and I'm well placed to remember. [...] That's all it had been able to retain from the great slaughterhouses of '14, the mass of mass: one word! Capital! Now she's got a mouthful of his word!"... The last sentences of the sequence were twice crossed out before the formula was found: "There's no need to explain. He's still there. He's just waiting."