Jules Renard by Felix Vallotton

I discovered Jules Renard through Woolgathersome's post of "The Snowchild." The Angel Flores collection she cites is still in print from Dover, though with a wallpaper cover. (And because I've been looking for a place to mention it, here's a link to Hawthorne's incredible "Snow-Image.")

Last night I flipped to one of two Renard stories in the 50s mass-market paperback French Stories and Tales. Editor Stanley Geist also snuck in stories by Marcel Schwob, Huysmans, and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and lists Francis Ponge in the Acknowledgments. You can find this book anywhere. (Here's one edition on Amazon.)

Here's the ending of Renard's 9-page story, "A Romance":

Feeling every minute more tranquil and innocent, I look behind and before me. The path is neat and in order; my soul likewise. Of course, there are one or two bad moments ahead of me: for example, unless I can find some excuse, I'll have to drink our well-water at the table without betraying any disgust. Also, there is the question of how I'm to behave in the presence of Francoise, at our first meeting -- our confrontation.

Will she lower her eyes?

It is seven o'clock. My mother and father are waking up, and Francoise, lying there exhausted, is choosing what words to say so that she won't have to get out of bed. I won't forget in a hurry the two hours of successive emotions which I've just gone through; and now I could do with a breath of fresh air; I need to relax.

Usually, when the sun is like this, the fish run close to the surface, leaping with open jaws upon the flies; and they are just as eager for artificial bait. A man might have very good luck this morning. I know a corner near the raspberry bushes where the thatch, with all its little gutters, keeps the ground in just that state of cool dampness which little yellow worms adore.

I take a pickax, raise it high with stiff arms, bring it down, and with the first blow I disinter -- I deliver -- a limp little bundle, a red muddy rag you wouldn't touch with a pair of tongs, the slimy envelope of my castoff delight, looking like nothing so much as a greasy, crumpled picnic paper....

The story ends with that ellipsis. It was translated by the poet Richard Wilbur, and may only exist in Geist's anthology (at least it's the only translation of Renard in Wilbur's archived papers). I'm prolonging my enjoyment of the story by not reading the first eight pages.

Tin House will soon bring out a new edition of Renard's Journal.

Renard's first novel, L'Ecornifleur, was translated as The Sponger and published by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1957. It seems to have been reprinted in 1989 by Richard Clark Ltd (never heard of this company). There's only one copy on Amazon as I write this, but it's available on used book sites.

Searching for more by Renard I came to an entry from the Goncourt Journals (March 5, 1891): "This evening saw the first visit to the Daudets' of Jules Renard, the ironic creator of Poil de Carrotte, a fellow with a head just like Rochefort's, but without his clown-like stubble of hair, a young fellow, but cold, serious, phlegmatic, not laughing as a young man would at the jokes told in his presence."

I really need this book. The very next entry begins: "In the Grenier, there was talk of Huysmans, who says that he is ill, troubled by the feel of something cold moving across his face..."

What?!

Back to French Stories and Tales. Geist includes fun author intros. For Renard he points out that "a young Jean-Paul Sartre, intent on literature of another kind, regarded him as an author whom it was essential to demolish" (this could be selling point these days). About Schwob he writes: "Trilingual at the age of three, an almost monstrously precocious adolescent, a young man of feverish, self-destructive brilliance, a mature writer whose character and gifts captivated friends as different as Paul Valery, Colette, and Jules Renard, Schwob died young, in Paris, after some ten years of painful invalidism against which scholarship and travel were the chief opiates."