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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
If you mention the name Minou Drouet to your French friends in Paris, not many of them under the age of fifty know whom you're talking about. But older people know very well, even if they don't all know the same thing. What do they think they know? She was seven--or was it eight?--years old. She wrote some poems. She didn't write some poems. In any case, they were a hoax, une supercherie; it was really her mother who wrote them. She was a victim of her publisher, of the press, of her family. She was talented, but she was a flash in the pan. She had no talent at all--what was it Cocteau said about her, something witty and bitchy? And Roland Barthes, in his "Mythologies"--didn't he weigh in, too?
There's a faint sense of embarrassment when people admit that they remember her, as if they'd just as soon forget that the world made all that fuss about nothing, and they move on to more elevated subjects, like Sartre and Juliette Greco and the Nouvelle Vague. Because Minou disappeared from the world stage so totally and so long ago, remembering her today reminds people that they're of a certain age. As a saleswoman in the bookstore around the corner from the Comedie Francaise remarked when I asked her whether any of Minou's work was available, "Well, that question definitely dates us!"
In fact, you can't find a book by Minou in any bookstore in Paris, not even her phenomenally successful "Arbre, Mon Ami," which was published just over fifty years ago--early in 1956--by the aggressive Rene Julliard, who a year earlier had scored an international triumph with Francoise Sagan's "Bonjour Tristesse." But Sagan had been eighteen; Minou was eight.
In his introduction to "Arbre, Mon Ami," Julliard explained that it was his friend Professor Pasteur Vallery-Radot "of the Academie Francaise"--the grandson of Louis Pasteur--who first told him about Minou. Vallery-Radot had heard about her from Lucette Descaves, of the Conservatoire de Paris, who was giving the little girl piano lessons, and who soon entrusted Julliard with a batch of letters she'd received from her pupil. "Never had I lit upon a vein of such richness," Julliard wrote. "I at once discovered a freshness and liveliness of feeling, a gift for imagery, and a power of expression that were quite exceptional--in short, a poet." Within days, he had arranged to meet Minou, whose adoptive mother brought her to Paris (from Brittany, where they lived), and soon the Julliards, too, were receiving extraordinary letters from her. Julliard was captivated by the child and impressed by the mother. He decided to publish.
But not in the standard way. Late in September, 1955, five hundred copies of a forty-eight-page sampling of Minou's poems and letters were meted out to "certain critics and amongst my friends." And at once a storm broke--a dispute that, Julliard wrote, "divided the literary and journalistic world into two houses--a sort of minor Dreyfus Affair." As Time put it late in November--beneath the heading "Rage of Paris"--"In France, where literature can be a hot front-page issue, the biggest story of the week--and the year's liveliest press brawl--raged around the blonde head of an eight-year-old poetess. Was little Minou Drouet a genius or a fraud?"
Proof that Time wasn't exaggerating exists in an obsessively detailed book called "L'Affaire Minou Drouet," which was rushed out by Julliard in early January, just as he was also publishing "Arbre, Mon Ami." The author, Andre Parinaud, took almost two hundred and fifty crammed pages to chronicle--in agonizing detail--the events of the few months that followed the private distribution of Julliard's pamphlet, recapitulating the vicious attacks and counter-attacks in the press, interviewing various participants in the fray, and drawing solemn conclusions.
Just before the pamphlet appeared, two of Minou's poems and two of her letters had been printed in the review Les Lettres Nouvelles. A few days later, L'Express ran "Who Is Minou Drouet?" and within two weeks the entire world of French literary journalism had joined in. L'Express was pro-Minou, who "writes poems that would place her among our fine poets--even if she were an adult." Combat was anti: "A prodigy, if you like; but a prodigy not of freshness but of a precocious pedantry." France Observateur: "It's impossible to believe that a more expert hand didn't guide these little seven-and-a-half-year-old fingers. Rimbaud, after all, was sixteen." Rimbaud?
Le Figaro, Le...
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