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“... I own two photographs of Jules Renard (1864-1910). There is no indication of when either of them was taken, and at times I have wondered if they are really of the same man. In the first, from a series called ‘Nos contemporains chez eux’, he sits at a cluttered desk; behind him is a scruffy bookcase and a calendar showing the first of some month; on the floral wallpaper hangs a looped speaking tube, perhaps for ordering his mid-morning coffee ...”

“... truth. Claudine à l’école was published by Ollendorff in 1900. The signature deceived no one. Jules Renard remarked on Willy’s varied talents, including that of female impersonation. Far from being a hirsute monster, as he appears in photographs, Willy was delicate, fallible, more than once caught out by circumstance. His mistresses quickly became ...”

“... Raison, the first, and quite the best, volume of Les Chemins de la Liberté. He reads critically: Jules Romains, whose ‘unanism’ was a strong and damaging influence on the second volume of Sartre’s trilogy; Flaubert, derided for the awkwardness of his style in an early display of Sartre’s ambiguous negativity towards the bel écrit; Gide, admired but ...”

“... The great​ French diarist Jules Renard (1864-1910) had small interest in non-literary art forms. When Ravel approached him wanting to set five of his Histoires naturelles, Renard couldn’t see the point; he didn’t forbid it, but declined to go to the premiere. He sat through Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and found it a ‘sombre bore’, its plot ‘puerile ...”

“... On 29 May, on the way to his first lecture, he was hit by a speeding truck and killed. He was 38. Jules Renard was one of Sebastian’s favourite writers. Reading Renard’s diary, the then 28-year-old Sebastian had reflected on the talent and the absurd death of the author of Poil de Carotte. The lines he wrote at the ...”

“... infected the way others wrote about him. The biographical note in the Pléiade edition of Jules Renard’s Journal takes up more space than the two entries devoted to him, one of which reads simply: ‘Fénéon’s goatee.’ Mallarmé was a close friend who stood as a character witness at his trial. But here is the poet writing to his near-miss ...”