Lot n° 389
Estimation :
1500 - 2000
EUR
Correspondence Gabriel Frizeau
FRIZEAU (Gabriel)... - Lot 389 - Briscadieu
Correspondence Gabriel Frizeau
FRIZEAU (Gabriel) - JAMMES (Francis)
Strong set of correspondence (1221 letters and cards approximately) from Gabriel FRIZEAU to Francis JAMMES and 4 letters and 8 postcards from Francis JAMMES or Mrs. JAMMES to Gabriel FRIZEAU or Mr. and Mrs. FRIZEAU.
A manuscript (Diane, dated 1927) in the hand of Mrs. Francis JAMMES, signed by the writer, and personally addressed to Gabriel FRIZEAU by Francis JAMMES, is attached. The work was published in 1928 in the collection Poétique de l'Ermitage.
Also enclosed: 5 letters and cards from Charles LACOSTE to Francis JAMMES.
Friendship is eternal!
After the departure of Charles Lacoste who was no longer there to survey the old Saint-Michel district, Francis Jammes continued to go to Bordeaux and visited very regularly his second great friend, Gabriel Frizeau and his family (Lucie, his wife, and his two children: Jean, who was his godson, and Anne-Madeleine):
"When I returned to Bordeaux, I no longer found my friend Charles Lacoste. Paris had taken him from me. It seemed that the old house where, in the raucous evening, the child I did not name was silhouetted in black, was mourning the absence of my brother. However I was welcomed with joy by my friends Frizeau".
Jammes had published his first great collections, Frizeau had become a recognized winegrower, a wise collector (Odilon Redon, Charles Lacoste, Eugène Carrière, André Lhote, Monticelli, Rouault, Gauguin), an art lover (so many writers (Jacques Rivière, André Gide, Alexis Léger, Paul Claudel went to his apartments), a patron of the arts, an honest man, a (animator, in particular, of the group of mutual support called "Cooperative of prayer").
The two companions were also great Christians. Thus, among Jammes' friendships in Bordeaux, Gabriel Frizeau, by his stability in his city, the place he held in high society, the solidity of his character, the firmness of his religious convictions, the breadth of his culture, his Christian charity, appears as the most representative friendship, so to speak the personification, of the irreducible rooting of the Pyrenean poet in the city of his adolescence and his studies.
Jammes speaks of Frizeau as follows: "He, Gabriel Frizeau, who was my high school classmate, but whom I found again only twelve or thirteen years after I had lost sight of him, belongs to that strong stock of Gironde winegrowers, most of whom are slumbering, but who reveal in a few isolated samples the incomparable power of their sap. They have become bourgeois, solidly nourished, square, poised, conservative in essence, and possess, like their wines, a solid fabric. They are of the race of Montesquieu and Montaigne. Jurisconsults, lawyers with a sonorous voice, they defend in the name of the spirit of the laws, bitterly, their advantageous patrimony; philosophers in love with beautiful discussions and essays, if I may say so, they build their interior cathedral in the end. Gabriel Frizeau is one of them. He says that his name, Frizeau, derives from the trade of miller, and that that of his mother's family, Coutreau, means the plow, from which the vine is plowed. In him, the beautiful elements of the earth, bread and wine, meet and serve the Eucharist which for twenty years has enlivened his soul. If intelligence tends to balance, I do not know a more intelligent man; if art wants emotion, I do not know a more sensitive one. He writes with splendor, clarity, certainty, rare criticism for his friends. That such a brain, such a spirit, would have changed us from so many incapable regents. Why couldn't we decide Frizeau, who didn't have the worries of material life, to show what he is? Why does he limit himself to admiring the few beautiful paintings and the poets that he owns, without doing his own work when he is singularly called to do so? Such is the question that I have been asking myself for a long time in vain. Perhaps, with a loving wife and gracious children, he wanted to be satisfied with happiness. (Les Caprices du Poète).
Between 1897 and 1937, the two friends exchanged correspondence which, despite its incompleteness, "shows Jammes in everyday life, preoccupied with the daily life of his work, concerned with the education of his children. It is thus that one sees him charging his generous friend with various commissions, like supporting the sale of one of his books at the bookseller Mollat (Rayons de miel, Ma fille Bernadette), buying a study on Barrès, helping a friend such as the violinist Krettly... (Correspondences. 1897-1938 - Gallimard, 1952).
A part of these correspondences that we propose contributed to the edition of this work.
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