Le Ramier
An unknown manuscript re-discovered
Professor David Walker recently recovered a lost correspondence by André Gide, consisting of some nine hundred letters which were published in two volumes. This research led in turn to the discovery of a previously unknown novella by Gide: Le Ramier, for which Professor Walker wrote a Postface on its publication in Paris.
Andre Gide wrote the novella Le Ramier in 1907, shortly after a life-changing romantic encounter with a young man in the South of France. The work was discovered after Professor Walker asked Gide's daughter, Catherine, to search among her father's papers for documents alluded to in the correspondence he had gathered together following investigations conducted in France and the United States.
The manuscript is referred to in letters Gide wrote to his friend Eugene Rouart, who brought the meeting about by inviting Gide to his estate near Toulouse. The letters contained coded references but Professor Walker was able to piece together information from his own research to discover the identity of the mysterious young man.
Ferdinand Pouzac, the hero of the story, was the seventeen-year-old son of one of Rouart's farm managers. The relationship was of great importance to Gide, who wrote about his experience on his return to Paris. He was, however, wary that people may think the work shocking and showed it to a trusted friend, the pioneering theatre director Jacques Copeau, who found it to be extremely moving.
Gide's daughter Catherine decided to publish the manuscript, in an attempt to shed more light on her father's life. She asked Professor Walker to write the Postface. This is a controversial subject area, but the manuscript is crucial to a proper understanding of Gide's life. Ferdinand was so important to Gide that his death from tuberculosis in 1910 (aged 20) prompted Gide to begin work on his autobiography, Si le Grain ne meurt.