CIORAN Emil M. (1911-1995).

AUTOGRAPHIC MANUSCRIT, The Mistake of Being Born [De l'inconvénient d'être né]; about 350 pages in-4 in 5 spiral notebooks (27 x 21 cm), numbered I to V. First version of his great book De l'inconvénient d'être né (Gallimard, 1973). On five spiral notebooks from the Librairie-papeterie Joseph Gibert, Cioran wrote his work with a blue ballpoint pen on the front of the pages, paginated from 1 to 329; he made more than thirty additions or corrections on the backs. On the cover of the first book, he wrote in pencil the first title he had in mind at the time: L'erreur de naître (The mistake of being born), with the subtitle Interjections in a frame; the cover of book IV bears the title Fluctuation. The manuscript bears numerous and important corrections, sometimes in red ballpoint pen; sometimes a new version of a thought is noted on a sticker stuck on the original version, sometimes even entire pages. Book I, red, is paginated 1 (loose leaf) and 3-70 (with additions on 14 versos); book II, green, is paginated 71-140 (with additions on 8 versos, and cuts on pp. 131 and 139); book III, blue, is paginated 141-188 and 191-195, plus 12 unnumbered leaves or paginated 1-8 (with additions on 10 versos); book IV, green, is paginated 211-179 (with 2 pages numbered 228, and small additions on the back of 2 pages); book V, red, is paginated 280-329 (additions on the back of 3 pages). This working manuscript, which sometimes even appears to be a first draft, is a first state of what will become, after elaboration and reclassification, De l'inconvénient d'être né. One finds there, in an order which is not yet that of the book, a quantity of thoughts and aphorisms, in a primitive version, often overloaded with corrections. Thus, at the top of page 3, one can read the first two aphorisms of section II, heavily corrected, then crossed out; two other thoughts follow, not taken up. Page 4 begins with a crossed-out aphorism: "Everyone thinks what they do is important. Except for me; so I can't do anything. This is followed by an interesting thought crossed out: "My form of cockroach is, let us say, 'Slavic'. God knows what steppe my ancestors came from? I have, like a poison, the hereditary memory of the unlimited. Moreover, like the Sarmatians, I am a doubtful, uncertain, suspicious individual, of a duplicity all the more serious because it is disinterested. Thousands and thousands of slaves proclaim in me their defeats and their contradictory humiliations. Two other aphorisms follow. At the top of page 5, we can read the first version of the third thought of section II of the book: "The more virtues one possesses, the less one advances. They are incompatible; the more vivid and real they are, the more they fight and neutralize each other. They are jealous. Whereas the vices are indulgent towards each other, and therefore more human, more fruitful. This explains the nullity and stagnation of honorable people"; after corrections, Cioran crossed out this thought, and wrote on the opposite page a new version, close to the final version. Let's quote again the beginning of the penultimate thought of section IV of the book, which Cioran deleted later (here p. 93): "In 1940, during the "phoney war", I had taken the habit of coming home very late. I lived in a hotel near Cluny. One night, an old white-haired whore asked me to walk a few steps with her, because she was afraid of a raid. The next night I met her again. Afterwards, at about three in the morning, when I returned home, she would watch for me and we would often talk about things until daylight. Our meetings ended with the curfew that followed the entry of the Germans into Paris. Germans entered Paris"... On some pages, Cioran noted references to other pages of this manuscript, to bring a first classification and a better sequence in his thoughts. Some thoughts are crossed out, in blue or red; others are circled; others are marked in the margin with a cross, or with several inverted S's. A large part of these notebooks seems to have remained unpublished. Some passages, not included in De l'inconvénient d'être né, will be taken up again later, such as, in Écartèlement, this account of a walk in the morning of November in Paris, from which we quote the beginning (p. 94): "Paris wakes up. In this month of November, before six o'clock in the morning, I hear, on the Avenue de l'Observatoire, a bird - just one - trying to sing. I stop, feeling unspeakably happy in such company. The end of the third notebook was used to write the beautiful text on Henri Michaux, Michaux ou la passion de l'exhaustif, which will be collected in the Exercises