GARD The immense Marc Bernard revisited, reread and enhanced

Alain Artus, residing in Nîmes, is a biographer who is particularly interested in literary figures from the South who have obtained national recognition.

This is how he is also the author of Léo Larguier, the voluptuousness of dreams (editions La Fenestrelle, 2017), the first (and only) biography of this writer. He also wrote Léo Larguier in a few images (La Voix Domitienne, 2023) in which he deepens a teleological vision of man and his creation.

Alain Artus was also in charge during the revised and expanded reissue of his biography Marc Bernard, The taste of life (NPL, 2013). In this new work by Alain Artus, we find in Marc Bernard, everything is fine like thisa preface signed Daniel Jean Valade and some beautiful additional pages which deal with, Jean Paulhan and Marc Bernard, Nîmes, literature and friendshipan original study taken from their correspondence.

Marc Bernard was born in Nîmes on September 6, 1900. As a young child, his father went to the new continent and became a gold prospector. Young Marc will not see him again, just like his brother Jean, who went on an adventure with the padre. It is therefore his mother Marie-Louise who raises Marc and his older sister alone. Poverty, but praised until he was 13 and his mother died of tuberculosis.

Marc has to work, bring in money. He varies the non-pleasures and will even check the list of winning numbers of the National Lottery after having completed laborious and manual jobs.

In 1929, Marc Bernard published New French Magazine his first novel and became a literary critic, but how did he become a writer? “ Perhaps, I said to myself, we write as we dream, perhaps we write because life does not entirely satisfy us and we sometimes want to take revenge on it.. »

From his nickname Nanay, then a child on the streets of Nîmes, to the twilight of his life through his Interallié (1934) and Goncourt (1942) prizes, his bohemian life, the Popular Front, the war and the post-war , radio and above all his desire to write… You will know everything about Marc Bernard.

It must be said that if today, unfortunately, Marc Bernard is an author little known to the general public, in his time he made everyone agree. Already, with his Goncourt prize which he won in 1942, Like childrenpublished by Gallimard, it is a story and not a novel which is awarded.

Marc Bernard crossed the 20th century as a privileged actor in this most fertile and politically unstable literary era.

Among his friends? Jean Paulhan, André Chamson, the Gide family for the most local, but also André Malraux, Paul Valéry…

« If there needed to be an archetype or, better, a perfection for this literary genre of exceptional interest that is biography, the one that Alain Artus created by Marc Bernard is exemplary. It traces with absolute precision the itinerary of life that only the study of the multiple bundle of sources allows, down to the most tenuous and sometimes the most significant events. » explains Daniel Jean Valade, former deputy for culture at the City of Nîmes, in the preface to the book.

Marc Bernard is characterized by his possessive, sensual, immoderate, almost epicurean love of life. His poor youth undoubtedly taught him to savor things.

The Nîmes elected official continues, “ To enter the biography that Alain Artus signs is to meet a man in all his complexity, his multiple theaters of life, his encounters which, throughout this Time that Marcel Proust spells with a capital letter, the deliver and deliver it throughout his writings. Marc Bernard's novels, plays, articles… bear witness to a life of conviction, righteousness. Let us be grateful to Alain Artus for this sum where “Nîmes, character in a novel”fertile ground, means so much to this sensitive man that was Marc Bernard. »

To finish and make us understand what the author was, just continue reading.

« We had the chance to observe him when he was out for a walk, alone or with his friends, along the boulevards of Nîmes. We were at the Town Hall when homage was paid to him. As guests thronged the buffet, he so discreetly and so intensely continued a glass of water. His art of writing, in the service of a life of passions, finds in Alain Artus the most competent and sincere memoirist. »

Let us remember that the Goncourt prize won by Marc Bernard was won with flying colors. Elected in the first round by seven votes to one to Germaine Beaumont (From where the day will come) and another to Lucien Rebatet (The rubble). The jury was then composed of Sacha Guitry, Rosny Jeune, Mr. Benjamin, Jean Ajalbert and Jean-Balthazar Mallard Count of La Varende.

The last ten pages of Marc Bernard Everything is good like this is reserved for his relationship with Jean Paulhan. The text by Jean Paulhan and Marc Bernard, Nîmes, literature and friendship is an original study taken from their correspondence. The text is not new but it is embellished, revised and corrected, filled with some anecdotes and well-intentioned sentences.