The Book and the Movie: Le feu follet / Will O’ the Wisp | Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, 1931 / Louis Malle, 1963

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“Alain gave a long, hollow laugh. Never had he such a precise feeling of his impotence. For him, the world was only peopled by empty shapes. It was enough to make you scream, to make you die.”

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Will O’ the Wisp, 1931

Don’t go. Don’t leave me. l need you.
Don’t leave, l’m begging you.

“I felt clumsy so I tried to make it funny. But I have never been able
to resign myself to succeeding only as a clown.”

“And in the mirror, he looked further, beyond his reflection. This empty room, this solitude… An immense shudder gripped him in the small of his back, right to the marrow, and ran from his feet to his head in an icy thunderbolt: death was present in person. It was solitude: he had threatened his life with it as though with a knife and now this knife had turned round and pierced his guts. No one, no hope left at all. Incurable solitude.”

“You did not believe in the reality of the world. You believed in a thousand little things, but not in the world. These thousand little things were symptoms of the great void. You were superstitious. The kind and cruel refuge of children rebellious and faithful to their rebellion to the day of their death: you worshipped a stamp, a glove, a revolver. A tree conveyed nothing to you, but a match was loaded with power (…) In your suicide’s cell, when I went in, your table had not moved. It was laden with amulets and gods. Gods of wretchedness, like those of tribes who do not have enough to eat, who are tired and afraid. One can only write about death, about the past. I can only understand you the day you are finished.”